Link Stress Reduction against Bursty Arrivals of Content Requests

Abstract

Content delivery networks are designed to extend the end-to-end transport capability of the Internet to cope with increases in video traffic. For further improvement, bursty request arrivals should be efficiently addressed. As opposed to previous approaches, in which the best client-server pair is individually selected (individual optimization), this paper proposes an algorithm for dealing with simultaneous arrival requests, in which client-server pairs are selected such that all requests receive good service (social optimization). The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with that of the closest algorithm, an individual optimization algorithm, under the condition that a large number of requests arrive simultaneously. The evaluation criterion is the worst link stress, which is the largest number of streams per link. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithm is effective for large-scale networks and that the closest algorithm does not provide near-optimal solutions, especially when all requests arrive in a small part of the network or when there are many servers.