Biblio

The distribution of video contents generated by Content Providers (CPs) significantly contributes to increase the congestion within the networks of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). To alleviate this problem, CPs can serve a portion of their catalogues to the end users directly from servers (i.e., the caches) located inside the ISP network. Users served from caches perceive an increased QoS (e.g., average retrieval latency is reduced) and, for this reason, caching can be considered a form of traffic prioritization. Hence, since the storage of caches is limited, its subdivision among several CPs may lead to discrimination. A static subdivision that assignes to each CP the same portion of storage is a neutral but ineffective appraoch, because it does not consider the different popularities of the CPs' contents. A more effective strategy consists in dividing the cache among the CPs proportionally to the popularity of their contents. However, CPs consider this information sensitive and are reluctant to disclose it. In this work, we propose a protocol based on Shamir Secret Sharing (SSS) scheme that allows the ISP to calculate the portion of cache storage that a CP is entitled to receive while guaranteeing network neutrality and resource efficiency, but without violating its privacy. The protocol is executed by the ISP, the CPs and a Regulator Authority (RA) that guarantees the actual enforcement of a fair subdivision of the cache storage and the preservation of privacy. We perform extensive simulations and prove that our approach leads to higher hit-rates (i.e., percentage of requests served by the cache) with respect to the static one. The advantages are particularly significant when the cache storage is limited.

The explosive growth of mobile traffic in the Internet makes content delivery a challenging issue to cope with. To promote efficiency of content distribution and reduce network cost, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and content providers (CPs) are motivated to cooperatively work. As a clean-slate solution, nowadays Information-Centric Networking architectures have been proposed and widely researched, where the thought of in-network caching, especially edge caching, can be applied to mobile wireless networks to fundamentally address this problem. Considered the profit split issue between ISPs and CPs and the influence of content popularity is largely ignored, in this paper, we propose a Stackelberg-based optimal network profit split scheme for content delivery in information-centric wireless networks. Simulation results show that the performance of our proposed model is comparable to its centralized solution and obviously superior to current ISP-CP cooperative schemes without considering cache deployment in the network.

With the growing number of streaming services, internet providers are increasingly needing to be able to identify the types of data and content providers that are being used on their networks. Traditional methods, such as IP and port scanning, are not always available for clients using VPNs or with providers using varying IP addresses. As such, in this paper we explore a potential method using neural networks and Markov Decision Process in order to augment deep packet inspection techniques in identifying the source and class of video streaming services.

Information Centric Networking (ICN) has been regarded as an ideal architecture for the next-generation network to handle users' increasing demand for content delivery with in-network cache. While making better use of network resources and providing better delivery service, an effective access control mechanism is needed due to wide dissemination of contents. However, in the existing solutions, making cache-enabled routers or content providers authenticate users' requests causes high computation overhead and unnecessary delay. Also, straightforward utilization of advanced encryption algorithms increases the opportunities for DoS attacks. Besides, privacy protection and service accountability are rarely taken into account in this scenario. In this paper, we propose a secure, efficient, and accountable access control framework, called SEAF, for ICN, in which authentication is performed at the network edge to block unauthorized requests at the very beginning. We adopt group signature to achieve anonymous authentication, and use hash chain technique to greatly reduce the overhead when users make continuous requests for the same file. Furthermore, the content providers can affirm the service amount received from the network and extract feedback information from the signatures and hash chains. By formal security analysis and the comparison with related works, we show that SEAF achieves the expected security goals and possesses more useful features. The experimental results also demonstrate that our design is efficient for routers and content providers, and introduces only slight delay for users' content retrieval.