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theses

Nowadays, the Internet usage is shifting towards information distribution and retrieval, with mobile data access becoming the norm. The mismatch between the dominant information-centric usage pattern and the location-based Internet architecture results in inefficient content services that heavily rely on application layer overlays. Therefore, the information-centric network (ICN) is proposed as a clean-slate network architecture to support mobile content delivery. ICN treats content as the first-class entity, and identifies content by its name at the network layer. The direct addressability of content in ICN facilitates content-oriented services. In this dissertation, we focus on two ICN architectures, i.e., content-centric networking (CCN) and MobilityFirst (MF), and investigate the corresponding transport control and content caching techniques which are crucial to content delivery. Content-centric networking (CCN) adopts a receiver-driven, hop-by-hop transport approach that facilitates in-network caching, which in turn leads to multiple sources and multiple paths for transferring content. We propose novel transport protocols, namely CHoPCoP and pCHoPCoP, to satisfy the requirements of CCN. Our transport protocols utilize explicit congestion control to cope with the multiple-source multiple-path situation and provides multi-homing support for CCN. Our evaluation of CHoPCoP/pCHoPCoP on the ORBIT testbed shows that the proposed transport protocols can effectively deal with congestion in the CCN environment and improve data transmission performance. Caching is widely used to disseminate content and offload content requests. We move a step further by proposing to have a separate popularity based cache and a prefetch buffer at the network edge to capture both long-term and short-term content access patterns, and use network-level mobility prediction to guide the prefetch. The framework, called EdgeBuffer, is discussed in the context of MobilityFirst architecture. Our simulation effort of EdgeBuffer framework demonstrates a significant cache hit ratio improvement at the edge. Then, we take a step back and compare several different content caching and request forwarding schemes in the general ICN context. Our investigation is intended to better understand whether pervasive caching and nearest replica routing could each bring significant benefits. The evaluation shows that pervasive caching is not better than edge caching; compared to pervasive caching, nearest replica routing brings more benefits, especially in a large network. We then propose a network architecture built upon MobilityFirst which adopts edge caching and approximates nearest replica routing. Finally, we present our system prototype and a field trial experiment of the MobilityFirst architecture. We design and develop a satellite-based video delivery system built on MobilityFirst, which takes advantage of the satellite network to efficiently distribute content to large area and utilizes edge caching to effectively offload requests. The whole video delivery system is implemented and examined on ORBIT testbed. The field trial validates the feasibility of real world deployment and the benefits it brings to practical use cases.

ETD_7482

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Feixiong Zhang

doi:10.7282/T3KD217T

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.