CDN: Content Distribution Network

TL;DR

This paper provides an overview of Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), discussing their design, implementation challenges, and solutions, including a peer-to-peer CDN scheme, to improve Internet service quality amid growing bandwidth demands.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive survey of CDN approaches, analyzes critical design issues, and introduces a peer-to-peer CDN scheme without infrastructure support.

Findings

CDNs improve Internet service quality by replicating content closer to users.

Survey of existing CDN approaches and their effectiveness.

Introduction of a peer-to-peer CDN scheme for fast service location.

Abstract

Internet evolves and operates largely without a central coordination, the lack of which was and is critically important to the rapid growth and evolution of Internet. However, the lack of management in turn makes it very difficult to guarantee proper performance and to deal systematically with performance problems. Meanwhile, the available network bandwidth and server capacity continue to be overwhelmed by the skyrocketing Internet utilization and the accelerating growth of bandwidth intensive content. As a result, Internet service quality perceived by customers is largely unpredictable and unsatisfactory. Content Distribution Network (CDN) is an effective approach to improve Internet service quality. CDN replicates the content from the place of origin to the replica servers scattered over the Internet and serves a request from a replica server close to where the request originates. In this paper, we first give an overview about CDN. We then present the critical issues involved in designing and implementing an effective CDN and survey the approaches proposed in literature to address these problems. An example of CDN is described to show how a real commercial CDN operates. After this, we present a scheme that provides fast service location for peer-to-peer systems, a special type of CDN with no infrastructure support. We conclude with a brief projection about CDN.