By John Jason Brzozowski and Jan van Doorn, Comcast Cable
For every dollar an MSO spends on delivering content from the Internet peering point to the cable subscriber, over 50 cents is spent on the Access Network [1]. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) do a great job reducing traffic, but, up until now, have done so above the Access Network, and thus, while saving the MSO money, they are not doing that in the area where they could get the most “bang for the buck”. MSO networks, including the Access Network, are scaled to peak usage, and are underutilized a large portion of the time - user demand and usage is, to some degree, predictable.
In this paper we propose a method of cooperative in-home caching and prepositioning that tries to take advantage of the predictable nature of user demand to reduce the highest peaks by utilizing some of the low points in traffic to pre-cache content in the home.