Integrating routing with content delivery networks

Several research efforts are underway to associate content “names” to the network space. There is a general belief that video and other types of cacheable content are going to continue to demand ever larger portions of a network´s bandwidth. Technologies that enable network link bandwidth increases are struggling to keep up with the network operators´ bandwidth demand at appealing cost-points. Network operators are considering using content delivery network (CDN) technologies as a means to cache content in the network and thus slow the need for ever larger network link bandwidths. In this paper we present an approach to extend the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) with a new address family geared to carry the uniform resource identifier (URI) namespace. Besides the benefits of using a proven scalable protocol, having both the CDN service and the network infrastructure operating across the same domain of information provides compelling benefits in the cross CDN and network traffic modeling space, as well as in the planning and operational domains.