Even though a key driver for Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has been the rise in Internet video traffic, there has been surprisingly little work on analyzing the interplay between ICN and video ? which ICN caching strategies work well on video work- loads and how ICN helps improve video-centric quality of experience (QoE). In this work, we bridge this disconnect with a trace- driven study using 196M video requests from over 16M users on a country-wide topology with 80K routers. We evaluate a broad space of content replacement (e.g., LRU, LFU, FIFO) and content placement (e.g., leave a copy everywhere, probabilistic) strategies over a range of cache sizes. We highlight four key findings: (1) the best placement and re- placement strategies depend on the cache size and vary across improvement metrics; that said, LFU+probabilistic caching [37] is a close-to-optimal strategy overall; (2) video workloads show considerable caching-related benefits (e.g., -- 10% traffic reduction) only with very large cache sizes (≥ 100GB); (3) the improvement in video QoE is low (≥ 12%) if the content provider already has a substantial geographical presence; and (4) caches in the middle and the edge of the network, requests from highly populated regions and without content servers, and requests for popular content contribute most to the overall ICN-induced improvements in video QoE.

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has seen a significant resurgence in recent years. ICN promises benefits to users and service providers along several dimensions (e.g., performance, security, and mobility). These benefits, however, come at a non-trivial cost as many ICN proposals envision adding significant complexity to the network by having routers serve as content caches and support nearest-replica routing. This paper is driven by the simple question of whether this additional complexity is justified and if we can achieve these benefits in an incrementally deployable fashion. To this end, we use trace-driven simulations to analyze the quantitative benefits attributed to ICN (e.g., lower latency and congestion). Somewhat surprisingly, we find that pervasive caching and nearest-replica routing are not fundamentally necessary---most of the performance benefits can be achieved with simpler caching architectures. We also discuss how the qualitative benefits of ICN (e.g., security, mobility) can be achieved without any changes to the network. Building on these insights, we present a proof-of-concept design of an incrementally deployable ICN architecture.

A successful supply chain responds to customer's requirements with minimum cost. In general, organizations which are members of a supply chain are independent of each other and try to maximize their own benefits. Appropriate behavior of each member is necessary but does not suffice to have a competitive supply chain. A supply chain coordination mechanism leads members to behave such that the entire supply chain satisfies customer demand with minimum costs. Previous research works which provided formally analyzed coordination mechanisms have made assumptions about restrictions on the number of supply chain stages and members in each stage. Moreover, multi-commodity case has not been investigated in the context of supply chain coordination yet. This paper exploits flow networks concept to propose a coordination mechanism which is applicable to supply chains with multiple members, multiple stages and presence of multi-commodity case while each commodity is composed of several basic components. In the proposed solution an entity named supply chain optimizer (SCO) which is actually an e-hub, gathers supply chain state information and after necessary computations, informs members of supply chain of optimal decisions about orders. The goal is to minimize operational costs of the whole supply chain while satisfying customer demand.

One of the most challenging issues in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) arena, which consist of autonomous and self interested nodes, is the problem of providing incentives for nodes to cooperate in forwarding network packets. In this paper, we propose Express as a cooperation mechanism which is both efficient in computations imposed on mobile nodes and secure against deceptive threats by nodes. Using Express, network nodes gain credit for participating in forwarding network packets. Recent works utilize digital signatures to provide security against cheating actions by nodes. Express substitutes hash operations for digital signature operations as much as possible, which consequently reduces computational overhead to a great extent. Setting credits and penalties through this mechanism, each node beneficially tends to adopt cooperative behavior.