C-flow: An efficient content delivery framework with OpenFlow

Abstract

Since the traffic of content-oriented applications/services is increasingly more dominant, there have been information centric networking (ICN) approaches that retrieve content objects by the names. Meanwhile, software defined networking (SDN) emerges as a viable solution to facilitate the deployment of new networking protocols and algorithms without disrupting production traffic by decoupling the control plane from the data forwarding plane. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based content delivery framework, called C-flow, which supports name-based routing and caching without disrupting production traffic in the legacy IP network. For that purpose, a content name is mapped to an IP address for ICN-like operations. We describe how C-flow supports the usage of in-network storage and content-based operations for legacy hosts. We also show how SDN functionalities in C-flow enhances the efficiency of content deliveries by dynamic re-routing, parallel transmissions and cache management.