Towards Content-Centric Geometric Routing

Content delivery is a crucial feature of existing cloud and telecom networks. This is confirmed by the tremendous success of media streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix, as well as the content and file-distribution systems such as BitTorrent. A recurring problem in these type of network services is about keeping the protocol overhead as low as possible while maximizing the efficiency of such systems in terms of network delay to customers. In this paper we propose the use of a routing system-inferred coordinate system to improve: i) content server selection upon receiving content requests, and ii) the mapping of content to servers/caches. We describe the required protocol mechanisms, and evaluate potential gains using coordinates of Geometric Tree Routing and compare it to pure IP-based mechanisms or measurement-based content systems relying on coordinates. The proposed approach can be further extended in order to include alternate geometric systems for example supporting hyperbolic geometries.