Towards controller-aided multimedia dissemination in Named Data Networking

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Named Data Networking (NDN) are two topics which have received lots of attention in the networking research community in recent years. While both have emerged independently from each other we believe that their core features can be well aligned to each other. Hence combining both may hold potential benefits for network operators. In this paper we investigate the advantage of having a central SDN controller which is aware of the complete topology of an underlying NDN network. In our approach we use the controller for routing Interests for names unknown to the forwarding elements and to find alternative routes in case of link congestion. Another advantage of SDN is the ability to analyze and control the network on an application-layer component which communicates with the controller. This allows the development of application-aware networks that support the specific needs of the applications that use them. As an example use case we assumed a network whose main purpose is to disseminate multimedia content with Zipf-distributed popularity among users. Having an application layer which knows about content popularity statistics we improve the dissemination of multimedia content by instructing dedicated nodes in the network to prefetch content which is expected to become popular in their geographical region or autonomous system (AS) in the near future. The aim of this approach is to reduce the distance to potential consumers and reduce the load of the core network.