Enabling the Internet to Provide Multimedia Services

Abstract

The Internet as of today is still mostly governed by the end-to-end principle, which demands that the network itself is to be kept as simple as possible and that all intelligence resides at the end-systems. This principle proved to be very successful and beneficial for the evolution of the Internet. Despite its success, we have recently seen more application-specific functionality moving into the network, in particular to the edges of the network. Deployment of network caches and content-aware switches are probably the most widely known examples for this kind of functionality. It helps accelerating the delivery of static web pages by moving content closer to the user.

However, margins for such basic delivery services are getting slimmer. Service providers have to take advantage of opportunities to provide new value-added content services for differentiation and additional revenue. Examples of such services include, but are not limited to, content filtering, content adaptation, dynamic and personalized content assembling, ad insertion and virus scanning.

This talk outlines the evolution from traditional web caching towards a flexible and open architecture to support a variety of content-oriented multimedia services. Enhancements include added support for streaming media, a component for global traffic redirection, and a set of protocols and interfaces for value-added features, such as compression, filtering, or transformation. Additional functionality can be integrated in different components, or be available as plugins. The talk will conclude with service examples currently being implemented on top of such a platform.