By Giovanna Carofiglio, Cisco Distinguished Engineer 3

By 2020, 82% of all IP traffic will be video and two-thirds of all Internet traffic will be generated from wireless and mobile devices, according to Cisco VNI forecast.

Video services are evolving (UHD 4K-8K video, Virtual/Augmented Reality) and drive future 5G networks design to match mobile usages, very-high bandwidth requirements and ultra-low latency constraints.

In parallel, video consumption is changing: less TV more connected devices usage, less broadcast more streaming, with a larger impact on network end-to-end from the access to the core.

All these factors put pressure on the capabilities of future 5G networks and highlight their critical role in the support of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming (DAS), namely the variety of techniques, in most of the cases relying on HTTP, to realize an efficient multimedia delivery over the Internet.

In the 5G mobile and heterogeneous network access, it seems of utmost importance to consider DAS interaction with the network and to move caching and computing capabilities to the network edge in order to enable efficient mobile video delivery.

This is what Information-Centric Networking (ICN) does by empowering the network with content-aware capabilities for a joint video/network optimization that results in better user experience and traffic cost reduction.

To prove potential for ICN application in adaptive streaming services as an alternative to standard TCP/IP transport, we in Cisco have worked on two directions: the design of Hybrid ICN (hICN), an incremental deployment strategy for ICN that preserves all its benefits while integrating ICN into the existing IP infrastructure and the definition of a virtualized video-centric ICN architecture with containerized ICN router instances to support mobile video delivery over a heterogeneous mobile access.

hICN benefits come from enhanced video rate adaptation, in-network loss recovery, dynamic load balancing, multicast and caching.   If you want to know more, you can read our white paper on "Mobile Video with hICN".

A live demonstration of ICN benefits over standard TCP/IP solutions for mobile video delivery will be done next week at the upcoming Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona. Hope to see you there!