Content Delivery Networks

The growth of the Internet both in terms of users and contents in the last few years has resulted in serious performance problems and degraded user experience for a large set of applications. Content Delivery (or, Distribution) Network is an effective approach to improve Internet service quality. CDNs evolves with the promise of higher scalability for the content providers and higher availability and lower user response time for the end users. Loosely speaking, a CDN is architecture of network surrogate servers, arranged for efficient delivery of web items. CDN replicates the content from the place of origin to the surrogate servers scattered over the Internet and serves a request from a surrogate server close to where the request originates. Like other business organizations, CDNs compete with each other to increase their market share. Many important design issues of a CDN such as strategies for surrogate server allocation and placement, dynamic content placement, server load balancing etc. are bound to depend on the technical and marketing strategies of the competitor CDNs. Our ongoing activities include understanding the competition among several CDNs in a competitive economy, studying how the above design issues may be influenced by this competition.

Also, there is an increasing trend among big enterprises having campuses in different continents to build their own content delivery network instead of outsourcing the work to CDN companies. In this case, there is no competition. Still it requires a trade off between financial benefit and performance gain. Understanding this trade off and looking into the design factors from this point of view is our another research goal.