Towards Peer-to-Peer Content Retrieval Markets: Enhancing IPFS with ICN

Abstract

In the current Internet, content delivery, e.g., video-on-demand (VoD), at scale is associated with a large distributed infrastructure which requires considerable investment. Content Providers (CPs) typically resort to third-party Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) or build their own expensive content delivery infrastructure in order to cope with the peak demand and maintain sufficient quality-of-service (QoS), while Internet Service Providers (ISPs) need to overprovision their networks. In this paper we take a first step towards designing a system that uses storage space of users as CDN caches and deliver content with sufficient (i.e., CDN-like) quality while rewarding users for their resource usage as in a content retrieval marketplace. As a possible candidate for such a system, we consider recent P2P storage and delivery systems that have adopted new mechanisms such as rewarding of useful work (e.g., storage) while ensuring fairness and accountability through cryptographic proofs. In this paper, we experiment with the popular Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and investigate its performance in delivering VoD content locally within an ISP. Our findings suggest that operating IPFS (operating on top of IP) has its performance limitations and complementing it with an ICN network layer can significantly improve the delivery quality. We then propose and compare several forwarding strategies for ICN which can efficiently route requests and balance the load between peers with limited uplink resources.