@PhdThesis{Posch2016a, author = {Posch, Daniel}, school = {Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt}, title = {Towards Effective Multimedia Dissemination in Information-Centric Networks}, year = {2016}, month = {dec}, abstract = {Real-time entertainment (mainly audio/video streaming) is responsible for the largest traffic share in today's networks. Social and entertainment platforms such as YouTube, Netflix and Facebook provide a tremendous amount of multimedia content to their global customers via the Internet. With the ever growing popularity of these services, the Internet is struggling to suffice the continuously increasing requirements demanded by applications. In particular, the demands go far beyond the intent of the Internet's original design. Architectural and legacy design choices lead to issues, the solutions to which are neither efficient nor elegant. One approach to tackle these challenges is Information-Centric Networking (ICN), a new concept for today's Internet. The idea is to base the network's principal communication model on the most important item, namely the content to be transferred. This novel concept provides significant opportunities to enhance networking. In this thesis we investigate how ICN can be used as an enabler for effective multimedia dissemination. As a first step we analyse the technology's characteristic capabilities and their potential benefits for content distribution in future networks. We develop an analytical model taking account of the main building blocks (network-inherent caching, multi-path forwarding) and compare the obtained upper bound to the current state of ICN considering the scenario of pull-based adaptive multimedia streaming. The results show that there exists a significant gap between the promised and the realized performance, largely caused by ineffective Interest forwarding strategies. Therefore, we design and implement a novel probability-based forwarding strategy named Stochastic Adaptive Forwarding (SAF), which provides effective multi-path forwarding, identifies unknown cached content replicas and deals with local topology changes without guidance from the routing plane. The results indicate that SAF brings ICN one step closer towards effective content distribution. In particular, we show that it is important to consider context information in the forwarding plane. This includes content characteristics and application demands. SAF is the first strategy that takes account of context information that can be supplied by the network operators. Furthermore, this work provides a framework for a testbed that can be used by researchers to readily deploy an ICN-based testbed. This allows researchers to conduct experiments on physical hardware providing deeper insights on proposed algorithms than network simulations or analytical methods could ever do. We use the testbed to validate our results concerning multimedia delivery in ICN, and conduct network emulations investigating the performance of SAF and its competitors. Furthermore, we compare the results of network emulations to the findings obtained from simulations to assess their validity. Both simulations and emulations show that our SAF approach provides a significant step towards effective multimedia content distribution in ICN.}, doi = {10.1145/3041027.3041029}, language = {EN}, pages = {210}, pdf = {https://www.itec.aau.at/bib/files/posch_thesis.pdf} }