Content-Aware Delivery of Scalable Video in Network Coding Enabled Named Data Networks

We propose a novel network coding (NC) enabled named data networking (NDN) architecture for scalable video delivery. Our architecture utilizes network coding in order to address the problem that arises in the original NDN architecture, where optimal use of the bandwidth and caching resources necessitates the coordination of the Interest forwarding decisions. To optimize the performance of the proposed network coding based NDN architecture and render it appropriate for transmission of scalable video, we devise a novel rate allocation algorithm that decides on the optimal rates of Interests sent by clients and intermediate nodes. The flow of Data packets achieved by this algorithm maximizes the average quality of the video delivered to the client population. To support the handling of Interest and Data packets when intermediate nodes perform network coding, we introduce the use of Bloom filters, which store efficiently additional information about the Interest and Data packets, and modify accordingly the standard NDN architecture. We also devise an optimized Interest forwarding strategy that implements the target rate allocation. The proposed architecture is evaluated for transmission of scalable video over PlanetLab topologies. The evaluation shows that the proposed scheme exploits optimally the available network resources

Network Coding Enabled Named Data Networking Architectures

The volume of data traffic in the Internet has increased drastically in the last years, mostly due to data intensive applications like video streaming, file sharing, etc.. This motivates the development of new communication methods that can deal with the growing volume of data traffic. To this aim, Named Data Networking (NDN) has been proposed as a future Internet architecture that changes how the Internet works, from the exchange of content between particular nodes of the network, to retrieval of particular content in the network. The NDN architecture enables ubiquitous in-network caching and naturally supports dynamic selection of content sources, characteristics that fit well with the communication needs of data intensive applications. However, the performance of data intensive applications is degraded by the limited throughput seen by applications, which can be caused by (i) limited bandwidth, (ii) network bottlenecks and (iii) packet losses. In this thesis, we argue that introducing network coding into the NDN architecture improves the performance of NDN-based data intensive applications by alleviating the three issues presented above. In particular, network coding (i) enables efficient multipath data retrieval in NDN, which allows nodes to aggregate all the bandwidth available through their multiple interfaces; (ii) allows information from multiple sources to be combined at the intermediate routers, which alleviates the impact of network bottlenecks; and (iii) enables clients to efficiently handle packet losses. This thesis first provides an architecture that enables network coding in NDN for data intensive applications. Then, a study demonstrates and quantifies the benefits that network coding brings to video streaming over NDN, a particular data intensive application. To study the benefits that network coding brings in a more realistic NDN scenario, this thesis finally provides a caching strategy that is used when the in-network caches have limited capacity. Overall, the evaluation results show that the use of network coding permits to exploit more efficiently available network resources, which leads to reduced data traffic load on the sources, increased cache-hit rate at the in-network caches and faster content retrieval at the clients. In particular, for video streaming applications, network coding enables clients to watch higher quality videos compared to using traditional NDN, while it also reduces the video servers' load. Moreover, the proposed caching strategy for network coding enabled NDN maintains the benefits that network coding brings to NDN even when the caches have limited storage space