Section: New Results

Information-Centric Networks

Participants : Yassine Hadjadj-Aoul, Gerardo Rubino, Leila Ghazzai.

The rise of popularity of video streaming services has resulted in increased volumes of network traffic, which in turn have created Internet bottlenecks leading to perceived quality degradations. One of the recognized good ways to tackle this type of congestion is to make the contents available inside ISPs' networks. We thus proposed, in [73] a network-friendly content delivery architecture that considers the complex video distribution chain and its associated business models. This comprehensive architecture allows a network operator to fully engineer video traffic distribution in order to both alleviate peering links' workload and improve delivered QoS. This proposal is fully compatible with Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABS) architectures, which are currently used to distribute video in the Internet.

The Content providers are increasingly becoming interested in evaluating the performance of such streaming protocol from the final users' perspective. Indeed, more importance is being attached to the quality as perceived by the final users, or Quality of Experience (QoE), as compared to just Quality of Service. Thus, we addressed in [68] the problem of estimating the QoE of video streaming in TCP/IP networks. As a solution, we designed an automatic no-reference QoE estimation module for HTTP video streaming using TCP and H.264 video codec. The proposed approach is different from the existing ones as it addresses the problem of measuring QoE in the combined case of adaptive video bitrates and the use of a reliable transport protocol. This is the case of the adaptive streaming over HTTP.

On the other hand, as introduced by ICN's content caching mainly addresses the management of the content in a particular cache, while the content replication consists in disseminating data in its way to the destination. The benefits of contents' replication can be completely cancelled with a bad caching technique. Thus, we proposed, in [75] , to analyse the interaction existing between caching strategies and content replication.