Peers-assisted dynamic content distribution networks

Abstract

Content distribution networks (CDNs) have been proposed to primarily distribute Web and some limited streaming audio/video content over the Internet. Current CDNs consist of fixed content nodes placed at strategic locations on the Internet to improve the service latency and to reduce server and network load. Although the approach of delivering content with a fixed CDN has enjoyed some successes, it is often difficult to upgrade and extend a CDN to serve more users due to a very high deployment cost. In this paper, we propose that a CDN be agile while delivering content. We make the case for a dynamic CDN architecture in which a CDN leverages local peers to deliver the CDN's content to local users. We define a formal problem for using peers to increase the capacity of a CDN and we propose an algorithm to help a CDN to dynamically recruit local peers to be part of the CDN. The CDN and the recruited local peers cooperate to serve content to other local users. Our performance evaluation shows promising results with the new dynamic CDN architecture. Our simple CDN growing strategies dramatically improve the average service latency in streaming video content