Forwarding and caching in video streaming over ICSDN: A clean-slate publish-subscribe approach

Nowadays, Internet usage has become prevalent, primarily because of high-quality heterogeneous multimedia content expectations from the subscriber (consumer), which puts tremendous pressure on the publisher (producer) in the networks. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is a future internet architecture that optimizes data resources through content-based forwarding and caching, making it well-suited for multimedia content and video streaming (VS) scenarios. However, real-time data delivery is challenging in the current ICN-based publish–subscribe (pub-sub) mechanism, which pushes the existing pub-sub studies to prioritize more on the forwarding information base (FIB) rather than the pending interest table (PIT). This leads to issues such as inefficient caching and forwarding mechanisms, high overhead, and communication costs. To address these challenges, in this paper, we present a novel forwarding and caching solution named VS-ICSDN, integrating the combined principles of ICN-based pub-sub scheme and software-defined networking (SDN) in order to utilize the network resources more efficiently. We design a clean-slate caching strategy and name-based forwarding method to support both on-path and off-path caching on ICN nodes to coordinate flow entries among the SDN controller and clean-slate ICN nodes to maximize PIT utilization. In addition, the framework allows the content to be stored and searched in chunks with a single request to access the desired content, reducing the communication overhead and significantly improving overall performance. A simulation-based testbed and experimental result analysis validate our proposed work’s effectiveness in ensuring efficient network resource usage with low communication overhead and computational cost compared to other baseline methods.