On the placement of Web server replicas

Abstract

There has been an increasing deployment of content distribution networks (CDNs) that offer hosting services to Web content providers. CDNs deploy a set of servers distributed throughout the Internet and replicate provider content across these servers for better performance and availability than centralized provider servers. Existing work on CDNs has primarily focused on techniques for efficiently redirecting user requests to appropriate CDN servers to reduce request latency and balance load. However, little attention has been given to the development of placement strategies for Web server replicas to further improve CDN performance. We explore the problem of Web server replica placement in detail. We develop several placement algorithms that use workload information, such as client latency and request rates, to make informed placement decisions. We then evaluate the placement algorithms using both synthetic and real network topologies, as well as Web server traces, and show that the placement of Web replicas is crucial to CDN performance. We also address a number of practical issues when using these algorithms, such as their sensitivity to imperfect knowledge about client workload and network topology, the stability of the input data, and methods for obtaining the input.