Replication based on Objects Load under a Content Distribution Network

Abstract

Users tend to use the Internet for "resource-hungry" applications (which involve content such as video, audio on-demand and distributed data) and at the same time, more and more applications (such as e-commerce, elearning etc.) are relying on the Web. In this framework, Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) are increasingly being used to disseminate data in today's Internet, providing a delicate balance between costs for Web content providers and quality of services for Web customers. The growing interest in CDNs is motivated by a common problem across disciplines: how does one reduce the load on the origin server and the traffic on the Internet, and ultimately improve response time to users? In this direction, crucial data management issues should be addressed. A very important issue is the optimal placement of the outsourced content to CDN's servers. Taking into account that this problem is NP complete, an heuristic method should be developed. All the approaches developed so far either take as criterion the network's latency or the workload. This paper develops a novel technique to place the outsourced content to CDN's servers, integrating both the latency and the load. Through a detailed simulation environment, using both real and synthetic data, we show that the proposed method can improve significantly the response time of requests while keeping the CDNs' servers' load at a very low level. © 2006 IEEE.