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Research in Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and Named Data Networking (NDN) has produced many protocol designs and software prototypes, but they need to be validated and evaluated by real usage on the Internet, which is also critical to the realization of the ICN/NDN vision in the long-run. This paper presents the first Internet-scale adaptive video streaming service over NDN, which allows regular users to watch videos using NDN technology with no software installation or manual configuration. Since mid-2019, the official NDN website has started using our service to deliver its videos to Internet users over the global NDN testbed, showcasing the feasibility of NDN. We conduct real-world experiments on the NDN testbed to validate the proper implementation of the client, network, and server sides of the proposed system and also evaluate the performance of our video streaming service.

Radical changes in Internet usage during the past few decades have created a big semantic gap between what the network provides (i.e., transport service) and what services and applications want (i.e., contents). The current Internet is an enormous transport network connecting two endpoints to each other and moves bits from one endpoint to another with no sense of what content has been requested. This network, although provides applications with transport services, can barely support content distribution at scale. The urgent need for a large-scale content distribution solution has resulted in the emergence of content networks. A content network understands what content has been solicited and tries to retrieve it from anywhere in the network, whether a cache or the origin (a.k.a. content producer). Such a network is a natural fit for today’s Internet as modern applications/services mostly ask for certain contents instead of accessing particular machines. To realize content networks within TCP/IP architecture with minimal changes to the Internet content distribution networks (CDNs) have been deployed. However, as the scale increases these networks are also facing challenges such as system complexity, resource footprint, and content security. The emerging Information-Centric Networking (ICN) technology, Named Data Networking (NDN) in particular, offers a network architecture that directly supports content distribution without requiring an overlay to bridge the gap between network services and application needs. This enables ICN/NDN to be potentially capable of supporting large-scale content distribution with less system complexity and resource footprint than TCP/IP-based solutions. In this dissertation, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, we scrutinize the content network built by NDN technology at the large-scale and compare it to TCP/IP-based solutions in the wild. We conduct real-world experiments to compare the standard deployment of NDN (i.e., the glob