On Communication Cost vs. Load Balancing in Content Delivery Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the trade-off between communication cost and load balancing in CDNs, formalizing it as a stochastic optimization problem and proposing heuristic solutions evaluated through extensive simulations.

Contribution

It formalizes the cost-load balancing trade-off in CDNs, proposes heuristic request mapping schemes, and analyzes their performance through simulations.

Findings

High query cost yields better trade-offs.

Multiple choices phenomenon improves performance with fewer queries.

Handling delay-sensitive requests degrades overall network performance.

Abstract

It is well known that load balancing and low delivery communication cost are two critical issues in mapping requests to servers in Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). However, the trade-off between these two performance metrics has not been yet quantitatively investigated in designing efficient request mapping schemes. In this work, we formalize this trade-off through a stochastic optimization problem. While the solutions to the problem in the extreme cases of minimum communication cost and optimum load balancing can be derived in closed form, finding the general solution is hard to derive. Thus we propose three heuristic mapping schemes and compare the trade-off performance of them through extensive simulations. Our simulation results show that at the expense of high query cost, we can achieve a good trade-off curve. Moreover, by benefiting from the power of multiple choices phenomenon, we can achieve almost the same performance with much less query cost. Finally, we can handle requests with different delay requirements at the cost of degrading network performance.