Preliminary study on the multi-path pre-caching mechanism for content delivery network

Abstract

A content delivery network (CDN) is composed of several edge servers which are distributed in different regions and provide web objects locally. If a web client sends one request to an edge server that has no available cache, i.e., cache miss, this edge server must download web objects from other edge servers or the origin server and then store into the cache. In this paper, we study and implement one multi-path pre-caching mechanism in which the edge server would parse the requested web page and then distribute requests to other edge servers to download web objects from the origin server simultaneously for accelerating the download speed. Furthermore, possible subsequent web objects are pre-cached in advance. Therefore, when a web client asks one of pre-cached web objects, our proposed mechanism can shorten the waiting time effectively.