Optimal pricing of content delivery network (CDN) services

2012

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.

2003

Abstract Caches have been used extensively to store the most popular/recent requested data to improve the user latency and reduce the network load. Recently, a more systematic approach to caching has been developed within the framework of content delivery networks (CDN). A CDN is the network of caches, where the caches are geographically distributed and serve user requests on behalf of the subscriber Web sites.

2003

Abstract Web sites disseminate some of their information to surrogate caches in order to reduce the latency observed during the delivery of the information. The surrogates classify publishers under several classes with respect to their willingness-to-pay. Surrogate partitions the total cache capacity among different classes to provide loose version of quality of service. In our model, publishers try to get as large cache space as possible, while the surrogate is required to achieve fair allocation among the publishers.

IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2017

2009

Abstract Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) balance costs and quality in services related to content delivery. This has urged many Web entrepreneurs to make contracts with CDNs. In the literature, a wide range of techniques has been developed, implemented and standardized for improving the performance of CDNs. The ultimate goal of all the approaches is to improve the utility of CDN surrogate servers. In this paper we define a metric which measures the utility of CDN surrogate servers, called CDN utility.

2002

Internet infrastructure is a key enabler of e-business. The infrastructure consists of backbone networks (such as UUNET and AT&T), access networks (such as AOL and Earthlink), content delivery networks (CDNs, such as Akamai) and other caching service providers. Together, all of the players make up the digital supply chain for information goods. Caches provisioned by CDNs and other entities are the storage centers, the digital equivalent of warehouses. These caches store and deliver information from the edge of ...

Information Technology and Management, 2011

One strategy for alleviating excess latency (delay) in the Internet is the caching of web content at multiple locations. This reduces the number of hops necessary to reach the desired content. This strategy is used for web content such as html pages, images, streaming video, and Internet radio. The network of servers which store this content, and the collections of objects stored on each server, is called a content distribution network (CDN). In order to optimally design a CDN, given a network topology with available server storage capacity at various points in the network, one must decide which object collections to place on each server in order to achieve performance or cost objectives. The placements must be within the storage limits of the servers and must reflect the request patterns for each collection of objects to be cached. Researchers have suggested formulations for the CDN problem which address performance by minimizing latency (the average number of hops is a commonly accepted measure of latency) from client to content, or formulations that focus on minimizing cost of storage and/or bandwidth. In this research, we develop a model which allows for the simultaneous treatment of performance and cost, present examples to illustrate the application of the model and perform a detailed designed experiment to gain insights into cost/hops tradeoff for a variety of network parameters.

Computer Communications, 2004

Content Distribution Networks (CDN) have recently appeared as a method for reducing response times experienced by Internet users through locating multiple servers close to clients. Many companies have deployed their own CDN-and so demonstrating the resulting effectiveness. However, many aspects of deployment and implementation remain proprietary, evidencing the lack of a general CDN model to help the research community analyze different working scenarios. In this paper, we propose a general expression for a content distribution environment and study the performance impact of design variables such as caching hit ratios, network latency, number of surrogates, and server capacity. Our conclusions are supported with simulations results. q

International Journal of Network Management, 2015

Hybrid content delivery networks (HCDN) benefit from the complementary advantages of P2P (Peer to Peer) networks and CDNs (Content Delivery Network). In order to extend a traditional CDN and enable it to offer hybrid content delivery service, we have modified a traditional domain name system-based request routing mechanism. The proposed scheme relies on an oligopolistic mechanism to balance the load on the edge servers and employs a truthful profit-maximizing auction to maximize the contribution of users in the P2P content delivery. In particular, economics of content delivery in HCDNs is studied, and it is shown that through our request routing mechanism, it is possible to deliver higher quality of service to majority of end-users, increase the net profit of the HCDN provider and decrease the content distribution cost at the same time.

10th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM) and Workshop, 2014

The growing importance of Content Delivery Network (CDN) in the value chain of content delivery raises concerns about the "neutrality" of these players. We propose in this paper a model to analyze the impact of revenue-oriented CDN management policies on the fairness of the competition among two content providers that use CDN services to deliver contents. We show that there exists a unique optimal revenuemaximizing policy for a CDN actor-the dimensioning and allocation of its storage capacity-that depends on prices for service/transport/storage, and on the distribution of content popularity. Using data from the analysis of traces from two major content providers (YouTube Live and justin.tv), we remark that a CDN remains a relatively neutral actor even when one of the content providers it serves tries to monopolize the CDN storage space by implementing an aggressive policy to harm its competitors.