Comparing NDN and CDN Performance for Content Distribution Service in Community Wireless Mesh Network

Content distribution has recently become a predominant service on the current Internet while the early Internet architecture was not designed for scalable content delivery. In this paper, we address the issue of content delivery in community wireless mesh networks (CWMN) with narrow and unstable wireless links providing services to communities, where each community represents a small number of users as compared to the normal Internet. To provide high quality content such as high definition video content to these communities, we propose to attach cache storage to each router on the network and use these distributed storage to enhance the delivery of the content. Two different content delivery methods, designed to accommodate scalable content delivery on the Internet, are compared on CWMN by this study. One is a pull based distributed cache or Named Data Networking (NDN) and another is the push based, Content Distribution Network (CDN). In the former approach data chunks get cached along the path to the requesting user while for the latter approach contents are pushed as close to the users as possible a priori. In this paper, we present an experimental performance evaluation in a laboratory environment where the distribution of content and request patterns were based on the log files collected from real village CWMN in the rural area north of Thailand.