Hybrid multi-tenant cache management for virtualized ISP networks

Abstract

In recent years, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have started to deploy Telco Content Delivery Networks (Telco CDNs) to reduce the pressure on their network resources. The deployment of Telco CDNs results in reduced ISP bandwidth utilization and improved service quality by bringing the content closer to the end-users. Furthermore, virtualization of storage and networking resources can open up new business models by enabling the ISP to simultaneously lease its Telco CDN infrastructure to multiple third parties. Previous work has shown that multi-tenant proactive resource allocation and content placement can significantly reduce the load on the ISP network. However, the performance of this approach strongly depends on the prediction accuracy for future content requests. In this paper, a hybrid cache management approach is proposed where proactive content placement and traditional reactive caching strategies are combined. In this way, content placement and server selection can be optimized across tenants and users, based on predicted content popularity and the geographical distribution of requests, while simultaneously providing reactivity to unexpected changes in the request pattern. Based on a Video-on-Demand (VoD) production request trace, it is shown that the total hit ratio can be increased by 43% while using 5% less bandwidth compared to the traditional Least Recently Used (LRU) caching strategy. Furthermore, the proposed approach requires 39% less migration overhead compared to the proactive placement approach we previously proposed in Claeys et al. (2014b) and achieves a hit ratio increase of 19% and bandwidth usage reduction of 7% in the evaluated VoD scenarios and topology.