Incentivizing user-assisted content distribution in information-centric network

As one alternative architecture of the current Internet, information-centric networking (ICN) concept has been proposed. In this paper, we first present implications of ICN features on P2P content distribution and identify one research topic: how to utilize the user resources efficiently in ICN. Then, we introduce the contribution-aware ICN to incentivize the user-assisted content distribution. Simulation results show that the contribution-aware ICN encourages the users to contribute their resources and prevent free-riders from using the resources. We also show that the content download performance improves significantly as the number of users contributing the resources increases.