PCLive: Bringing Named Data Networking to Internet Livestreaming

The lack of application support is probably the biggest obstacle to ICN/NDN deployment. One approach to tackle this problem is to NDNize existing applications by translating between applicationlevel protocols and NDN, which can benefit from NDN's architectural advantages while minimizing development efforts needed. In this paper, we validate the effectiveness of this approach by applying it to Internet livestreaming, and develop PCLive, a livestreaming system with NDN embedded as its distribution network. PCLive makes minimal changes to an Internet livestreaming architecture, achieving the maximum compatibility with existing components including video players, OBS, and video transcoders. By solving a number of design issues such as HLS/NDN protocol translation, data translation, naming and security, PCLive is able to run over an NDN network and enjoy its architectural benefits. Since December 2021, PCLive has been running on an NDN testbed consisting of cloud servers from seven cities. It can serve almost four times as many clients as an existing livestreaming system can over IP under the same network conditions; at the same time, the average throughput of the bottleneck link in the NDN testbed is 34.8% lower than that in IP. We also evaluate congestion control and adaptive forwarding with PCLive.