Joint Request Balancing and Content Aggregation in Crowdsourced CDN

Recent years have witnessed a new content delivery paradigm named crowdsourced CDN, in which devices deployed at edge network can prefetch contents and provide content delivery service. Crowdsourced CDN offers high-quality experience to end-users by reducing their content access latency and alleviates the load of network backbone by making use of network and storage resources at millions of edge devices. In such paradigm, redirecting content requests to proper devices is critical for user experience. The uniqueness of request redirection in such crowdsourced CDN lies that: on one hand, the bandwidth capacity of the crowdsourced CDN devices is limit, hence devices located at a crowded place can be easily overwhelmed when serving nearby user requests; on the other hand, contents requested in one device can be significantly different from another one, making request redirection strategies used in conventional CDNs which only aim to balance request loads ineffective. In this paper, we explore request redirection strategies that take both workload balance of devices and content requested by users into consideration. Our contributions are as follows. First, we conduct measurement studies, coving 1.8M users watching 0.4M videos, to understand request patterns in crowdsourced CDN. We observe that the loads of nearby devices can be very different and the contents requested at nearby devices can also be significantly different. These observations lead to our design for request balancing at nearby devices. Second, we formulate the request redirection problem by taking both the content access latency and the content replication cost into consideration, and propose a request balancing and content aggregation solution. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our design using trace-driven simulations, and observe our scheme outperforms the traditional strategy in terms of many metrics, e.g., we observe a content access latency reduction by 50% over traditional mechanisms such as the Nearest/Random request routing scheme.