– FIBRE –

Approaching Content Delivery in Approaching Content Delivery in Software Defined NetworkingSoftware Defined Networking

FIBRE Workshop, November 5th, 2013

Pedro Martinez-Julia, Antonio F. SkarmetaDepartment of Communications and Information Engineering

University of Murcia30100, Murcia, Spain

Background● Most of the traffic crossing the Internet is originated by

content delivery transactions.● Any speedup in content delivery means an improvement

of the whole Internet.● Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) aim to place content

pieces as close as possible to the clients that request them but they do not shortcut the client/server model, so:– Clients have to reach the original servers before they can

retrieve content pieces, and

– Original servers have to know the state and location of the content replicas to tell the clients where to get it.

● The Future Internet (FI) requires an integrated way to facilitate efficient content delivery.

Problem Statement (I)

InternetInternet

ContentProducer

ContentProducer

ContentProducer

ContentProducer

ContentProducer

ContentConsumer

ContentConsumer

ContentConsumer

ContentConsumer

ContentConsumer

ContentProducer

ContentProducer

ContentProducer

ContentProducer

Problem Statement (II)

ContentConsumer

ContentConsumer

ContentConsumer

ContentConsumer

ContentProducer

ContentConsumer

In-NetworkCache

In-NetworkCache

In-NetworkCache

Problem Statement (III)● Simplified problem definition:

– How content providers (producers) determine which cache element or elements will be used to store each content piece.

– How clients determine (or are directed to) the location from which the content they want can be retrieved.

● Information Centric Networking (ICN) has a response... but current ICN proposals require new functional blocks, network elements, and data plane protocols.

Proposed Approach (I)● Retain the simplicity of the problem definition:

– Only one data type: content.

– Three main actors: producers, consumers, caches.

– Two operations:● (For producers) Distribute content pieces among caches.● (For consumers) Retrieve content pieces from caches or

their original producer.

● Add an upper layer Information Centric Control Plane (ICCP) that implements the operations by exploiting the capabilities offered by Software Defined Networking (SDN).

Proposed Approach (II)

Content Producer

ICN Client Agent

Data Interface

Content Consumer

Data Interface

ICN Client Agent

SDN Controller

ICN Controller

In-NetworkCache

In-NetworkCache

SDN-enabled Network

Proposed Approach (III)● ICN Controller:

– Builds (and keeps updated) the topology of content pieces and the locations they are cached.

– Ensures that the policies which are negotiated previously with content providers are enforced to their content.

– Tells consumers the location of the element to contact for retrieving the content it wants, mainly the MPLS source/destination labels to use.

– Monitors cache elements to manage their status and, possibly, to decide to move copies of certain content pieces in order to balance resource consumption.

Proposed Approach (III)● Information Centric Control Plane:

– Retains simplicity in its design, permitting one-round-trip operations, so the control plane is not overloaded.

– Facilitates identification and location of content pieces.– Provides authentication operations to authenticate

content providers against their content and obtain the policies to apply.

– Permits communication between ICN client agents of consumers and providers traversing the ICN controller.

– Protects ICN overlay from unauthorized and/or abusive/dangerous transactions.

Research Objectives● Find the best mechanism to translate content

delivery operations to the underlying network.– The initial alternative we considered is to connect

consumers with caches/providers by dynamically generated MPLS labels and set the SDN to route them accordingly.

● Explore different identification mechanisms for content, providers, and clients so that they can be unequivocally identified without relying onto strong authentication.

● Evaluate and validate the approach on top of wide environments and scenarios.

Preliminary Evaluation● We have designed wide experiments to be run in

our facility as well as in the OpenLab facility, specially PlanetLab Europe (PLE) and NITOS.

● First, in order to have a reference to compare our approach, we have run some experiments with CCN, a widely known proposal for ICN.

● We have also set the experiment to vary the size of content pieces so we can have a better understanding of the behavior of CCN.

● The next step will be to reproduce the same results with our approach, using an SDN/OpenFlow based experimentation infrastructure (underlying network).

Experimentation Testbed (I)

GAIA Extended Experimentation Infrastructure

Experimentation Testbed (II)

Experiment running on GAIA, PlanetLab Europe, and NITOS

Preliminary Results (I)

Results of content delivery time for 1024 bytes of chunk size

Preliminary Results (II)

Results of content delivery time for 48 bytes of chunk size

Discussion● The experiment has demonstrated that a

typical ICN architecture suffers from packet losses, specially when they happen to the interest packets that request the content.

● Despite the fact that the experiment has been run on top of an experimentation infrastructure that adds extra overhead to the results, we can see that the caching mechanisms of CCN are well suited to improve the performance of the network.

Conclusions● The content delivery problem has been converted into a

very simple problem.● A lightweight control plane and control protocol have been

designed to control content delivery operations on top of an SDN enabled network.

● The proposed approach does not require to introduce complex routing elements into the network:– The SDN will provide the data forwarding.

– ICCP will provide the ICN view of the network.

● By exploiting the decoupling of control and data plane, the proposed approach has very low impact into the network architecture, provided that it is SDN enabled, and has reduced time and resource requirements to be deployed.

THANKS FOR YOUR THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTIONATTENTION

– – EOF –EOF –