Economic Incentives in Content-Centric Networking: Implications for Protocol Design and Public Policy

Content-centric networking (CCN) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for future Internet architecture design due to its efficient support for content dissemination, which currently dominates Internet use. This dissertation shows how economic and social welfare analysis can be used to inform the design of a CCN architecture that provides network stakeholders with incentives to deploy and use. Firstly, the dissertation investigates the economic incentives of different stakeholders to deploy content-centric network Internet architectures and shows that network operators will fail to deploy sufficient storage infrastructure to support CCN without payment flows from publishers. However, the level of payment required differs for different network players, which gives them different competitive advantages in providing storage infrastructure and content delivery services. Secondly, it evaluates the social welfare implications of different storage deployment scenarios in a CCN-based architecture and identifies two deployments that maximize social welfare. In the first, edge networks provide the storage infrastructure through a transaction broker. In the second, edge networks pay third-parties an amount, equivalent to the realized benefits from a storage node, to deploy storage infrastructure in the network. All other deployment scenarios lead to a deadweight loss. Thirdly, the dissertation identifies content delivery functionalities that break in a CCN-based architecture and shows how these functionalities can be successfully replicated and enhanced by a careful design of the structure of routable content, content naming and the meta-information added to content. The proposed design supports several content delivery applications and can be easily extended to other networking principals. Finally, the dissertation identifies and discusses threats in the CCN content delivery model and proposes some mechanisms to address these threats. In addition, the dissertation identifies some policy implications of the CCN content delivery model and proposes some policy interventions that may lead to desirable deployment outcomes.