Leveraging utilization as performance metric for CDN enabled energy efficient internet of things

Abstract

The exponential increase in the Internet of Things (IoT) has drastically augmented the need for computing and storage resources. IoT devices generate massive data that requires to be efficiently stored and disseminated for further processing and decision making. Given this, Content Distribution Networks (CDN) play a vital role to store and serve contents through geographically distributed surrogate servers in an IoT environment. Thanks to the explosive rise in IoT devices, CDN installations are also significantly increasing, hence, consuming a substantial amount of energy. The dynamic energy consumption of CDN resources is proportional to their utilization. Therefore, it is very crucial to design and develop utilization aware policies and strategies for sustainable content distribution. In the literature, different approaches have been proposed to improve the CDN performance by improving CDN utility in terms of security, authentication, and confidentiality, etc. Whereas, these works largely neglect the efficient utilization of CDN resources. In this perspective, this paper investigates the fact that CDN utility does not reflect the utilization of CDN resources. For this purpose, a comprehensive analysis is performed by comparing both metrics - CDN utility and CDN utilization, under various CDN scenarios. The results show that CDN utilization exhibits lower values even if the CDN utility is showing promising results. Hence, we recommend to consider utilization as a major metric to evaluate the performance of a CDN policy.