MTO: Multicast-Based Traffic Optimization for Information Centric Networks

Qingyi Zhang, Xingwei Wang, Jianhui Lv, Min Huang

Abstract: Traffic optimization in Information Centric Networks (ICN) inevitably involves making full use of in-network storages. Although ICN provides efficient content delivery and traffic offloading by exploiting nearby cached content and reducing redundant transmissions for same content requests, it inherently follows an opportunistic fashion to utilize in-network caches. In this paper, we improve network traffic distribution for ICN by leveraging multicasting. Specifically, introducing Software-Defined Networking (SDN), a virtual point-based algorithm is proposed to achieve many-to-many multicasting with global optimization. Furthermore, we propose a tunnel-based bandwidth allocation mechanism to improve the scalability of the system. Extensive simulation results show that multicast tree can be constructed optimally and meanwhile our proposal significantly improves network performance in terms of load balancing and network utilizazation.