Edge Erasure Coding for Secure Peak-Time Content Delivery
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Solution Overview
Problem
The increasing demand for video streaming services leads to bandwidth bottlenecks and network peak times, causing lower quality of experience for users, as existing methods for content distribution are inefficient in optimizing network usage and protecting sensitive content.
Innovation Solution
The integration of network coding with erasure coding in edge network devices, which assesses penalty functions to determine optimal content distribution and storage strategies, allowing for early distribution of content fragments that can be reconstructed later, reducing computational demand and network bandwidth usage while protecting copyrighted content.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of energy
If content is transmitted ahead of time to reduce network load during peak times, then network bandwidth usage is optimized, but security of sensitive content deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The content is divided into multiple fragments using erasure coding, where the original content is split into N fragments and any K fragments are sufficient for reconstruction. This segmentation allows distributed storage across multiple edge devices, reducing the risk of security breaches while enabling efficient content delivery.
Solution Approach 2:
Erasure coding acts as an intermediary mechanism between content storage and content delivery. Instead of storing and transmitting complete content files, the system uses encoded fragments as intermediaries that can be reconstructed only when sufficient fragments are collected, providing both security and efficiency.
2Reliability
If encryption techniques are used to protect early distributed sensitive content, then security is improved, but computational demand and design complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system changes the security approach from cryptographic encryption to algebraic erasure coding. Instead of using complex encryption algorithms that require key management and heavy computation, the system uses polynomial-based erasure coding where content is represented as coefficients of a polynomial, and security is achieved through the mathematical property that K out of N fragments are needed for reconstruction.
3Speed
If complete content is stored at edge devices for fast delivery, then response time is improved, but network bandwidth optimization deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary encoding of content into fragments and distributes these fragments to edge devices in advance. When a user requests content, the edge device can quickly assemble the required K fragments and reconstruct the original content locally, providing fast response times without requiring complete content to be pre-stored at all edge locations.
Data Source
AI summary
A network device includes memory with permanent storage. A request for information is received from a user device. In response to determining that an erasure encoded version of the requested information is not stored in the memory of the network device, the requested information is requested to be transmitted from a storage external to the network device and partially received. In response to determining that an amount of the partially received requested information does not satisfy an erasure encoding threshold, it is determined whether the erasure encoding threshold can be satisfied within a time duration. If so, the partially received requested information is erasure encoded, stored in the permanent storage, and transmitted. If not, the requested information is requested to be retransmitted from the storage external to the network device.