Many content distribution architectures offer desirable elements that lead to less bandwidth usage, reduced network congestion, higher content availability, and reduced costs. However, their level of adoption and utilization in commercial environments depends on the level of content accounting and accountability they offer. Content accounting refers to any information that a content distributor needs to track relating to the delivery of content to its intended consumers. In contrast, content accountability refers to the willingness of the communicating infrastructure to produce accurate and verifiable information about the content distribution process. This article surveys existing and proposed future content delivery architectures detailing their methodologies for providing efficient low-cost content distribution, content accounting, and accountability across trustworthy and untrustworthy infrastructures. We use two methods to help identify the drawbacks and merits of these architectures. The first is a taxonomy for accounting information based on our analysis of logging information gathered from the surveyed systems. The second is a generic model for content distribution based on a synthesis of desirable elements from the surveyed architectures. These methods help highlight key architectural elements required for efficient low-cost content distribution. Finally, we identify outstanding challenges related to establishing accountability in accounting information produced for content distributed across trusted and untrusted infrastructures.

Content providers (i.e., entities that own or are licensed to sell or distribute content e.g., BBC, Netflix) are looking for more efficient, secure, cheaper, accountable and scalable mechanisms for the delivery of content to end-users. The Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm offers solutions to some of these challenges by decoupling a user's trust in content from where it is obtained by enabling the content to self-verify (i.e., the user can establish integrity, trust and provenance in content received from trusted or untrusted infrastructure). However, there are still associated challenges with using ICN architectures related to content feedback and accountability. In this paper, we propose an ICN architecture extension for content feedback and accountability called the Savant framework, which we apply to the Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture.

The Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm offers solutions to some of the functional and performance limitations of the current Internet architecture by offering secure, efficient and scalable mechanisms for the delivery of content to end-users. However, ICN architectures fail to provide adequate content accountability for the content distribution process. (We use accountability and feedback interchangeably to refer to the logging information collected as part of the content distribution process). In this paper we propose the Savant architecture, which is a scalable accountability framework for ICN content distribution. We outline our current work and some preliminary results, which demonstrate the viability and scalability of the Savant architecture. Finally, we briefly outline avenues for future work.

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