Improving content delivery with size-aware routing in hybrid satellite / terrestrial networks

As Internet usages expand quickly, access networks are modernized with new technologies like fiber-optic communications. However, upgrade costs are prohibitive in sparsely populated areas, the latter turning notably towards satellite connection. Indeed, this technology allows deploying a high-throughput Internet access quickly in these regions. Nevertheless, GEO satellites induce a long delay, not experienced on terrestrial infrastructures despite their low throughput. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous network with both a satellite and a terrestrial path. This kind of architecture is known to be difficult to operate because of the important differences between used technologies. The emerging Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) transport protocol, whose design enables to aggregate disparate paths properly, brought new hopes for heterogeneous networks. However, it does not take user Quality of Experience (QoE) into account as it focuses on maximizing the links occupancy. This paper proposes an intelligent path selector using the content size to maximize users QoE in heterogeneous networks. Before detailing this method, we describe the architecture able to retrieve the size of delivered contents thanks to Content Delivery Network Interconnection (CDNI). Finally, we implement a testbed to evaluate the behavior of the proposed routing method. The results show a significant improvement of the delivery performance, outperforming MP-TCP.