Content Delivery Networks: Status and Trends

CDNs improve network performance and offer fast and reliable applications and services by distributing content to cache servers located close to users. The Web's growth has transformed communications and business services such that speed, accuracy, and availability of network-delivered content has become absolutely critical - both on their own terms and in terms of measuring Web performance. Proxy servers partially address the need for rapid content delivery by providing multiple clients with a shared cache location. In this context, if a requested object exists in a cache (and the cached version has not expired), clients get a cached copy, which typically reduces delivery time. CDNs act as trusted overlay networks that offer high-performance delivery of common Web objects, static data, and rich multimedia content by distributing content load among servers that are close to the clients. CDN benefits include reduced origin server load, reduced latency for end users, and increased throughput. CDNs can also improve Web scalability and disperse flash-crowd events. Here we offer an overview of the CDN architecture and popular CDN service providers.

[1]  Bruce M. Maggs,et al.  Globally Distributed Content Delivery , 2002, IEEE Internet Comput..

[2]  Steffen Rothkugel,et al.  Enhancing the Web's Infrastructure: From Caching to Replication , 1997, IEEE Internet Comput..

[3]  Syam Gadde,et al.  Web caching and content distribution: a view from the interior , 2001, Comput. Commun..

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

[5]  Brad Cain,et al.  A Model for Content Internetworking (CDI) , 2003, RFC.

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

[7]  Krithi Ramamritham,et al.  Accelerating Dynamic Web Content Generation , 2002, IEEE Internet Comput..

[8]  Wei-Ying Ma,et al.  Content Services Network: The Architecture and Protocols , 2001 .

[9]  Randy H. Katz,et al.  Dynamic Replica Placement for Scalable Content Delivery , 2002, IPTPS.

[10]  Lili Qiu,et al.  On the placement of Web server replicas , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[11]  I. Lazar,et al.  Exploring content delivery networking , 2001 .

[12]  Balachander Krishnamurthy,et al.  Flash crowds and denial of service attacks: characterization and implications for CDNs and web sites , 2002, WWW.

[13]  Bo Li,et al.  On the optimal placement of web proxies in the Internet , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).