Scalable and efficient file sharing in information-centric networking

Abstract Internet usage has been increasingly shifting toward massive content retrieval and distribution. To satisfy the demand, information-centric networking (ICN) approaches have emerged. These approaches have common features such as in-network caching and the decoupling of content and location to enable efficient content delivery. In this paper, we investigate the performance issue of file sharing in ICN. Compared to web and user generated content (UGC), file sharing entails relatively low request rates, but much larger content. These characteristics make it difficult for file sharing traffic to take advantage of in-network caching while competing with web and UGC traffic. For scalable and efficient file sharing, we design a peer-aware routing (PAR) protocol to utilize peers' storage in ICN. PAR uses a name-based shared tree without additional name resolution service. The shared tree is built at a network layer to connect peers for the same purpose, allowing a peer to discover the nearest peer holding the requested content in the tree. To evaluate the proposed PAR protocol, we conducted a large-scale simulation with a BitTorrent trace over the Internet-scale topology. We show that our protocol can substantially reduce inter-domain traffic, while keeping network overhead low.