Named Functions for Media Delivery Orchestration

Abstract

Content delivery networks (CDN) so far have served media distribution by effectively outsourcing it to a network of replica servers: Content requests are satisfied by redirection to some rewritten server addresses. While at present CDNs are leveraged in edge-sitting application server, Content Centric Networking (CCN) is a generalized manifestation of CDNs inside the communications infrastructure: It only supports server-free content names such that forwarding nodes overhearing any type of content delivery can remember it, and subsequent requests by the same name can be served locally, instead of at the original source. In this paper we introduce a framework for orchestrating media distribution tasks in the spirit of CCN by means of named functions. Being able to request a computation by name, like e.g. a video transcoding, content providers as well as content consumers influence the way content is selected, transformed and transferred. The aim of named function networking (NFN) is to serve as a redirection mechanism that allows the network to allocate memory and computation resources in the most optimal way (as CDNs do for content replicas). Particularly compelling is that NFN can serve as a full-fledged media delivery orchestration infrastructure from within the network. We demonstrate its power with scenarios ranging from simple uses for in-network stream buffering and transcoding, to more complex tasks as content-revocation, (video) session authentication and content store management.