Network delay guarantee for differentiated services in content-centric networking

The newly adopted built-in caching mechanism guarantees efficient content delivery for content-centric networking (CCN) as compared to the existing IP-based networks such as the Internet. However, it is a challenge at the same time for CCN to meet QoS requirements due to content caching. In this paper, we investigate the problem of providing network delay guaranteed services in CCN. More specifically, we study the problem of meeting network delay requirements for differentiated services (content providers) in CCN while at the same time optimizing the overall content delivery performance. To support delay guarantee, we first present a simple and holistic network model which characterizes network delays of routing content to clients at different locations. By aligning network locations with content popularity, we ensure that each content provider has an optimized network delay of routing content to clients. We then derive analytical network delays for content providers by incorporating their content distribution models into the proposed holistic network model, and further formulate the delay guarantee task as a nonlinear integer programming (NIP) problem under the given network resources and traffic access patterns. We evaluate our mechanism and investigate the optimized network performance using different real/synthetic network topologies. With numerical studies, we analyze the process of competing for the network resources by different content providers, and investigate how various factors (e.g., content popularity, traffic volume, router storage capacity) affect this competition process. Our models and results presented in this paper provide guidance in designing resource provisioning and QoS mechanisms for CCN.