Content aware routing: A content oriented traffic engineering

Content transfer, e.g. video transfer, is now becoming major traffic in the current Internet. Content transfer originally has a content oriented feature of “wherever content is retrieved, users only take care of what content they obtain”. Conventional traffic engineering aims to obtain optimal routes for traffic between ingress and egress router pairs, which has “location oriented feature, i.e. where to connect”. With content oriented feature of user demand for content traffic, traffic engineering can be changed towards content oriented routing design. In this paper, we propose a novel content oriented traffic engineering, named CAR (Content Aware Routing). In CAR, routes are designed for content and egress router pair, i.e. content traffic towards a receiver-side router. Content demand can be flexibly distributed to multiple servers(repositories) providing the same content, which means content can be obtained from anywhere. With numerical examples by linear programming formulation, we comparatively evaluate CAR with comparing with combination of CDN and traffic engineering, i.e. location oriented designs. Numerical results show that CAR improves maximum link utilization significantly with slight increase of network resource usage.