Approaching Content Delivery in Software Defined Networking, FIBRE Workshop, November 5th, 2013, Pedro Martinez-Julia, Antonio F. Skarmeta, Department of Communications and Information Engineering, University of Murcia, 30100, Murcia, Spain

1. – FIBRE –
Approaching Content Delivery in
Software Defined Networking
FIBRE Workshop, November 5th, 2013
Pedro Martinez-Julia, Antonio F. Skarmeta
Department of Communications and Information Engineering
University of Murcia
30100, Murcia, Spain

2. Background
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Most of the traffic crossing the Internet is originated by
content delivery transactions.
Any speedup in content delivery means an improvement
of the whole Internet.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) aim to place content
pieces as close as possible to the clients that request
them but they do not shortcut the client/server model, so:
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Clients have to reach the original servers before they can
retrieve content pieces, and
Original servers have to know the state and location of the
content replicas to tell the clients where to get it.
The Future Internet (FI) requires an integrated way to
facilitate efficient content delivery.

3. Problem Statement (I)
Content
Producer
Content
Producer
Content
Producer
Content
Producer
Content
Producer
Content
Consumer
Content
Consumer
Internet
Content
Consumer
Content
Consumer
Content
Consumer

4. Problem Statement (II)
Content
Producer
Content
Producer
Content
Producer
Content
Producer
Content
Producer
In-Network
Cache
In-Network
Cache
Content
Consumer
Content
Consumer
In-Network
Cache
Content
Consumer
Content
Consumer
Content
Consumer

5. Problem Statement (III)
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Simplified problem definition:
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How content providers (producers) determine
which cache element or elements will be used to
store each content piece.
How clients determine (or are directed to) the
location from which the content they want can be
retrieved.
Information Centric Networking (ICN) has a
response... but current ICN proposals require
new functional blocks, network elements, and
data plane protocols.

6. Proposed Approach (I)
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Retain the simplicity of the problem definition:
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Only one data type: content.
–
Three main actors: producers, consumers, caches.
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Two operations:
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(For producers) Distribute content pieces among caches.
(For consumers) Retrieve content pieces from caches or
their original producer.
Add an upper layer Information Centric Control
Plane (ICCP) that implements the operations by
exploiting the capabilities offered by Software
Defined Networking (SDN).

7. Proposed Approach (II)
ICN Client Agent
ICN Controller
ICN Client Agent
SDN Controller
Data Interface
Content Consumer
In-Network
Cache
In-Network
Cache
SDN-enabled Network
Data Interface
Content Producer

8. Proposed Approach (III)
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ICN Controller:
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Builds (and keeps updated) the topology of content
pieces and the locations they are cached.
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Ensures that the policies which are negotiated
previously with content providers are enforced to
their content.
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Tells consumers the location of the element to
contact for retrieving the content it wants, mainly the
MPLS source/destination labels to use.
–
Monitors cache elements to manage their status and,
possibly, to decide to move copies of certain content
pieces in order to balance resource consumption.

9. Proposed Approach (III)
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Information Centric Control Plane:
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Retains simplicity in its design, permitting one-roundtrip operations, so the control plane is not overloaded.
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Facilitates identification and location of content pieces.
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Provides authentication operations to authenticate
content providers against their content and obtain the
policies to apply.
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Permits communication between ICN client agents of
consumers and providers traversing the ICN controller.
–
Protects ICN overlay from unauthorized and/or
abusive/dangerous transactions.

10. Research Objectives
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Find the best mechanism to translate content
delivery operations to the underlying network.
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The initial alternative we considered is to connect
consumers with caches/providers by dynamically
generated MPLS labels and set the SDN to route
them accordingly.
Explore different identification mechanisms for
content, providers, and clients so that they can
be unequivocally identified without relying onto
strong authentication.
Evaluate and validate the approach on top of
wide environments and scenarios.

11. Preliminary Evaluation
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We have designed wide experiments to be run in
our facility as well as in the OpenLab facility,
specially PlanetLab Europe (PLE) and NITOS.
First, in order to have a reference to compare our
approach, we have run some experiments with
CCN, a widely known proposal for ICN.
We have also set the experiment to vary the size of
content pieces so we can have a better
understanding of the behavior of CCN.
The next step will be to reproduce the same results
with our approach, using an SDN/OpenFlow based
experimentation infrastructure (underlying network).

12. Experimentation Testbed (I)
GAIA Extended Experimentation Infrastructure

13. Experimentation Testbed (II)
Experiment running on GAIA, PlanetLab Europe, and NITOS

14. Preliminary Results (I)
Results of content delivery time for 1024 bytes of chunk size

15. Preliminary Results (II)
Results of content delivery time for 48 bytes of chunk size

16. Discussion
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The experiment has demonstrated that a
typical ICN architecture suffers from packet
losses, specially when they happen to the
interest packets that request the content.
Despite the fact that the experiment has been
run on top of an experimentation infrastructure
that adds extra overhead to the results, we can
see that the caching mechanisms of CCN are
well suited to improve the performance of the
network.

17. Conclusions
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The content delivery problem has been converted into a
very simple problem.
A lightweight control plane and control protocol have been
designed to control content delivery operations on top of
an SDN enabled network.
The proposed approach does not require to introduce
complex routing elements into the network:
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The SDN will provide the data forwarding.
ICCP will provide the ICN view of the network.
By exploiting the decoupling of control and data plane, the
proposed approach has very low impact into the network
architecture, provided that it is SDN enabled, and has
reduced time and resource requirements to be deployed.

18. THANKS FOR YOUR
ATTENTION

19. – EOF –