Caching Techniques on CDN Simulated Frameworks

Abstract

It is evident that in the new Web era, content volume and services availability play a major role, leaving behind typical static pages which have solely text and images. The majority of the business oriented service providers are concerned for the Quality of Services (QoS), in terms of content delivery. In this context, proxy servers and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have been prosposed as different technologies, dealing with this concern. Their common goal is to bring content close to the users, reducing the response time. Both technologies demonstrate different advantages and disadvantages. CDNs are characterized by robustness in serving huge amounts of requests and content volumes. However, their main shortcoming is that due to replication and distribution cost, replica placements should be static for a large amount of time. This leads to unoptimized storage capacity usage since the surrogate servers would contain redundant, possibly outdated, or unwanted content. On the other hand, proxy servers adapt content caching according to varying access patterns, using cache replacement algorithms. However, proxy servers do not scale well for serving large volumes of data or user populations. In an effort to combine the advantages of both, earlier recent work [2, 20, 29, 30] investigated different approaches that enable Web caching in CDNs, taking proxy servers’ characteristics into account. As new caching ideas emerge, the need for a CDN testbed, suitable for performance evaluation and stress testing, becomes evident. Such a testbed should provide a