Video Streaming over Named Data Networking

1. Introduction Named Data Networking (NDN) is a proposed future Internet architecture that offers many advantages over TCP/IP [1], and holds significant promise for content distribution applications, such as video streaming. The TCP/IP architecture assigns IP addresses to hosts, making the Internet essentially a point-to-point communication system. NDN allows data consumers to retrieve desired content by directly using application-specified hierarchical data names, enabling a general-purpose distribution system. This approach, in combination with NDN's per-packet content signatures, permits any node in the network to cache named data packets and respond to requests for them. This is in sharp contrast to the current IP Internet, wherein a video producer sends data packets directly to every viewer, even when multiple viewers are watching the same video at the same time, and even when those consumers share the same upstream routers where the data could be easily cached. Not only does NDN enable the use of storage in the network to cache popular data that are frequently requested by multiple users—reducing bandwidth and improving performance—it also enables video producers to easily provide a variety of other functions. For example, producers can assign meaningful names to video data (e.g., timecode frame indexes using a well-established naming convention), so video consumers can simply request specific video content by names to seek (rewind or fast forward). Because of such properties, video streaming can benefit significantly from NDN. In fact, video streaming has already received considerable attention in the CCN/NDN research community. Early developments include the CCNx VLC plug-in [2] and GStreamer plug-in [3] as test applications. A number of more recent research efforts have produced additional results. For example, Xu et al. compared HTTP live streaming with a CCNx-based approach on Android [8]. Others considered how devices can collaborate to share bandwidth for the same video [9] and rate adaptation [10], as well as additional topics in the context of NDN. This paper provides an overview of NDNVideo, a complete software solution developed at UCLA for video and audio streaming over NDN that serves as a representative example of how content-centric applications can be implemented in this new architecture. NDNVideo takes advantage of NDN's features to provide highly scalable, random-access