Improving content delivery by exploiting the utility of CDN servers

Abstract

As more aspects of our work and life move online and the Internet expands beyond a communication medium to become a platform for business and society, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have recently gained momentum in the Internet computing landscape. Today, a large portion of Internet traffic is originating from CDNs. The ultimate success of CDNs requires novel policies that would address the increasing demand for content. Here we exploit the CDN utility - a metric that captures the traffic activity in a CDN, expressing the usefulness of surrogate servers in terms of data circulation in the network. We address the content replication problem by replicating content across a geographically distributed set of servers and redirect users to the closest server in terms of CDN utility. Through a detailed simulation environment, using real and synthetically generated data sets we show that the proposed approach can improve significantly the performance of Internet-based content delivery. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.