How can an ISP merge with a CDN?

Abstract

As delivering contents has become the dominant usage of the Internet, efficient content distribution is one of the hottest research areas in the network community. In future networks, it is anticipated that network entities such as routers will be equipped with in-network storage due to the trend of ever decreasing storage cost. In this article, we propose a novel content delivery architecture called ISP-centric content delivery (iCODE) by which an ISP can provide content delivery services as well. iCODE can provide efficient content delivery services since an ISP can cache contents in routers with storage modules considering traffic engineering and the locality of the content requests. Compared to CDN and P2P systems, iCODE can offer reduced delivery latency by placing the contents closer to end hosts, and incentives to ISPs by reducing inter- ISP traffic and allowing traffic engineering. We also discuss the technical and business issues to realize the iCODE architecture.