Towards Improvements in resource management for content delivert networks

Abstract

During the last decades, the world web went from a way to connect a handful of nodes to the means with which people cooperate in search of knowledge, social interaction, and entertainment. Furthermore, our homes and workstations are not the only places where we are connected, the mobile broadband market is present and changing the way we interact with the web. According to Cisco, global network traffic will be three times higher in 2018 than it was in 2013. Real-time entertainment has been and will remain an important part of this growth. However, the internet was not designed to handle such demand and, therefore, there is a need for new technologies to overcome those challenges. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) prove to be an alternative to overcome those challenges. The basic concept is to distribute replica servers scattered geographically, keeping content close to end users. Following CDN’s popularity an increasing number of CDNs, most of them extremely localized, began to be deployed. Furthermore, Cloud Computing emerged, making software and hardware accessible as resources through well-defined interfaces. Using Cloud services, such as distributed IaaS, one could deploy complex CDNs. Despite being the best technology to scale content distribution, there are some scenarios where CDNs may perform poorly, such as flash crowd events. Therefore, we need to study content delivery techniques to efficiently accompany the ever increasing need for content contemplating new possibilities, such as growing the number of smaller localized CDNs and Cloud Computing. Examining given issues this work presents strategies towards improvements in Content Delivery Networks (CDN). We do so by proposing and evaluating algorithms, models and a prototype demonstrating possible uses of such new technologies to improve CDN’s resource management. We present P2PCDNSim, a comprehensive CDN simulator designed to assist researchers in the process of planning and evaluating new strategies. Furthermore, we propose a new dynamic Replica Placement Algorithm (RPA), based on the count of data flows through network nodes, that maintains similar Quality of Experience (QoE) while decreasing cross traffic during flash crowd events. Also, we propose a solution to improve the mobile backhaul’s replica placement flexibility based on SDN. Our experimental results show that the delay introduced by the developed module is less than 5ms for 99% of the packets, which is negligible in today’s LTE networks, and the slight negative impact on streaming rate selection is easily outweighed by the increased flexibility