Smart content delivery on the Internet

As the ever-growing Internet applications in the emerging e-society are centered in sharing of various types of digital contents, content delivery on the Internet as a hot topic has been attracting most attentions. Web caching is an important technology for improving the efficiency of content delivery. As an emerging technology en-route caching computes locations among caches on access paths to store copies of an object such that specified objectives (such as satisfying future access demands to the object) are achieved. In this talk, I will first give an overview on recent developments in efficient content delivery. I will then introduce our recent work in tackling this problem by applying the technique of en-route caching, and present efficient solutions to the problem in systems containing single server and multiple servers respectively. While the problem is NP-hard in the general case, our solutions apply dynamic programming technique and run in polynomial-time in the worst case for both unconstrained and constrained cases in the network topologies of trees (for broadcast delivery) and linear arrays (for point-to-point delivery) respectively. They are shown theoretically either optimal or convergent to optimal. Finally, I will show some possible extensions of our solutions to other system settings.