Providing Crowd-Sourced and Real-Time Media Services through an NDN-Based Platform

Abstract

The diffusion of social networks and broadband technologies is letting emerge large online communities of people who stay always in touch with each other and exchange messages, thoughts, photos, videos, files, and any other type of contents. At the same time, due to the introduction of crowd-sourcing strategies, according to which services and contents can be obtained by soliciting contributions from a group of users, the amount of data generated and exchanged within a social community may experience a radical increment never seen before. In this context, it becomes essential to guarantee resource scalability and load balancing to support real-time media delivery. To this end, the present book chapter aims at investigating the design of a network architecture, based on the emerging Named Data Networking (NDN) paradigm, providing crowdsourced real-time media contents. Such an architecture is composed by four different entities: a very large group of heterogeneous devices that produce media contents to be shared, an equally large group of users interested in them, a distributed Event Management System that creates events and handles the social community, and an NDN communication infrastructure able to efficiently manage users requests and distribute multimedia contents. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we evaluate its performance through a simulation campaign based on real-world topologies.