Collaborative Caching in Content-Oriented Networks

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Collaborative Caching in Content-Oriented Networks"

by

Mr. Jie DAI


ABSTRACT:

The content-oriented network is becoming a reality with enormous amount of 
contents such as high- definition videos and software packages being 
spreading across the entire network as the daily routine. Such an 
explosive demand on the content delivery over content-oriented networks 
has recently gained much attention with the increasing popularity and the 
successful deployment of commercial systems. However, this also poses 
significant challenges on the existing network infrastructure due to the 
tremendous consumption of resources such as storage, link bandwidth and 
the involved network traffic cost. With the large amount of contents 
available in the entire network, how to efficient utilize the network 
capacity is becoming a critical problem in both research and practice.

The deployment of cache servers in content-oriented networks can help to 
alleviate the resource scarcity. Cached contents are usually located close 
to users, which can greatly reduce the traffic on the network backbone 
with the improved performance. Despite a large amount of existing caching 
mecha- nisms in the conventional web applications, little has been done in 
the cache design for content-oriented networks, which exhibit unique 
traffic features and user behaviors. Furthermore, there is a great 
potential as well as challenge in exploring collaboration among caching 
servers given the distributed nature and the autonomous property of cache 
servers.

In this proposal, we have addressed the design and the analysis of 
collaborative caching mechanisms in different scenarios of 
content-oriented networks.We first discuss caching strategies in 
structured content- oriented networks. Based on the hierarchical topology 
derived from a real-world IPTV system, we have proposed an efficient 
mechanism to explore the capacity of the existing system infrastructure. 
We then explore collaborative caching mechanisms in peer-to-peer (P2P) 
applications, which are considered as typical unstructured 
content-oriented networks. We specifically focus on eliminating the 
inter-domain traffic cost, with respect to dynamic P2P traffic patterns, 
peering policies and cache server capacity constraints. We then design 
incentive mechanisms for the cache collaboration in wireless multimedia 
systems, in order to promote the potential collaboration among cache 
servers of different administrative domains.

Through studies in both structured and unstructured content-oriented 
networks, we can observe that the overall system performance can greatly 
benefit from the proposed collaborative caching mechanisms while the 
involved traffic cost is also minimized. Caching decisions are made based 
on specific topological properties, capacity constraints and optimization 
objectives. The analysis on incentive mechanisms further improves the 
practicability of proposed mechanisms.


Date:                   Monday, 12 March 2012

Time:                   3:30pm - 4:30pm

Venue:                  Room 3405
                         lifts 17/18

Committee Members:      Prof. Bo Li (Supervisor)
                         Dr. Lin Gu (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lei Chen
 			Prof. Chin-Tau Lea (ECE)


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