Content Services Network: The Architecture and Protocols

Content delivery networks (CDNs) can be viewed as application-specific overlay networks that make web caching an infrastructure service accessible to any content provider. As the Internet continues to evolve with increasing diversity and heterogeneity, we see a growing demand for extending the capabilities of network intermediaries to provide additional services such as content adaptation, personalization, watermarking and location-aware data insertion. A content services network (CSN) is proposed in this paper to make content transformation and processing an infrastructure service accessible to its subscribers. One can think of CSN as another layer of network infrastructure built around CDNs. This layer interacts collaboratively with user-agents, content servers, and other network intermediaries including ISPs’ caching proxies and CDNs’ surrogates in the content delivery process to provide value-added services. Furthermore, a CSN provides network resources that are used as a “service” distribution channel for value-added services providers to make their applications an infrastructure service. To demonstrate the utility of our proposed CSN model, we describe the prototype implementation of a video segmentation and keyframe selection system as an infrastructure service that can be used by content providers or end users to enhance the way video is delivered over the Internet.