Measuring a commercial content delivery network

Content delivery networks (CDNs) have become a crucial part of the modern Web infrastructure. This paper studies the performance of the leading content delivery provider - Akamai. It measures the performance of the current Akamai platform and considers a key architectural question faced by both CDN designers and their prospective customers: whether the co-location approach to CDN platforms adopted by Akamai, which tries to deploy servers in numerous Internet locations, brings inherent performance benefits over a more consolidated data center approach pursued by other influential CDNs such as Limelight. We believe the methodology we developed for this study will be useful for other researchers in the CDN arena.

[1]  Joel Wein,et al.  ACMS: the Akamai configuration management system , 2005, NSDI.

[2]  Balachander Krishnamurthy,et al.  On network-aware clustering of Web clients , 2000, SIGCOMM.

[3]  Michael Rabinovich,et al.  Content Delivery Networks: Protection or Threat? , 2009, ESORICS.

[4]  Kirk L. Johnson,et al.  The measured performance of content distribution networks , 2001, Comput. Commun..

[5]  I. Parker.  Facts and figures. , 1973, The Probe.

[6]  Michael Rabinovich,et al.  Network distance estimation with dynamic landmark triangles , 2008, SIGMETRICS '08.

[7]  Michael Rabinovich,et al.  Facilitating focused internet measurements , 2007, SIGMETRICS '07.

[8]  Michael Rabinovich,et al.  Content delivery networks: how big is big enough? , 2009, PERV.

[9]  Anja Feldmann,et al.  Improving content delivery using provider-aided distance information , 2010, IMC '10.

[10]  C. Pipper,et al.  [''R"--project for statistical computing]. , 2008, Ugeskrift for laeger.

[11]  Aleksandar Kuzmanovic,et al.  Drafting behind Akamai (travelocity-based detouring) , 2006, SIGCOMM 2006.

[12]  Michele Colajanni,et al.  Evaluating User-perceived Benefits of Content Distribution Networks , 2004 .

[13]  Balachander Krishnamurthy,et al.  On the use and performance of content distribution networks , 2001, IMW '01.

[14]  Fred Douglis,et al.  CDN brokering , 2002, Comput. Commun..

[15]  Anees Shaikh,et al.  On the responsiveness of DNS-based network control , 2004, IMC '04.

[16]  Aleksandar Kuzmanovic,et al.  Thinning akamai , 2008, IMC '08.