BCDN: A proof of concept model for blockchain-aided CDN orchestration and routing

Abstract

As the conventional definition, the Content Delivery Networks (CDN) build surrogate servers on top of the Internet architecture to provide contents to the end users as fast as possible. However, the high client requests lead to overloading of the surrogate servers. Despite the routing procedures which try to distribute these high requests among end users, routing these requests to other surrogate servers also emerges as a crucial content provisioning problem. This leads another challenge, which is the high latency that is an inevitable consequence of the conventional CDN architecture. To this end, it is necessary to design a CDN architecture which provides orchestration framework for virtual instances and routing procedure among surrogate servers, by considering the client trends. Moreover, during the routing procedure, the content provisioning should also be taken into account to prevent latency arisen from caching problems. For this purpose, we propose a proof of concept CDN model which combine a novel orchestration framework and blockchain architecture, Blockchain-Aided CDN, namely BCDN. Here the main reason to use Blockchain methodology is its specific features of distributed contracts and fully automated reliable flow generation. With this proposed orchestration framework, we provide dynamically changing virtual instances of the surrogate servers according to client requests and resource capacity. Moreover, by using blockchain network, we ensure that the our proposed CDN model can handle with evenly distributed high bandwidth requests by considering status of other Points of Present (PoPs). Also, deducing from the blockchain data enable surrogate servers to make content provisioning.