Online cost minimization for operating geo-distributed cloud CDNs

Cloud-based content delivery networks (Cloud CDN) cache and deliver contents from geo-distributed cloud data centers to end users across the globe, exploiting "infinite" on-demand cloud resources to address volatile user demands. It is critically important to efficiently manage cloud resources in different locations over time, for minimization of the operational cost of the CDN provider, while delivering short response delay to user requests. Although many have studied cost-aware replica placement and request redirection in CDN systems, most are restricted to an offline or one-time setting, or resort to greedy heuristics for online operation. This work proposes an efficient online algorithm for dynamic content replication and request dispatching in cloud CDNs operating over a long time span, targeting overall cost minimization with performance guarantees. Our online algorithm consists of two main modules: (1) a regularization method from the online learning literature to convert the offline cost-minimization optimization problem into a sequence of regularized problems, each to be efficiently solvable in one time slot; (2) a randomized approach to convert the optimal fractional solutions from the regularized problems to integer solutions of the original problem, achieving a good competitive ratio. The effectiveness of our online algorithm is validated through solid theoretical analysis and trace-driven simulations.

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

[2]  P. Krishnan,et al.  The cache location problem , 2000, TNET.

[3]  Chen Tian,et al.  Optimizing cost and performance for content multihoming , 2012, SIGCOMM '12.

[4]  Ramesh K. Sitaraman,et al.  The Akamai network: a platform for high-performance internet applications , 2010, OPSR.

[5]  Gábor Lugosi,et al.  Prediction, learning, and games , 2006 .

[6]  Jianliang Xu,et al.  Placement problems for transparent data replication proxy services , 2002, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[7]  Yuval Shavitt,et al.  Constrained mirror placement on the Internet , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

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

[9]  Hermann Hellwagner,et al.  Improving Internet Video Streaming Performance by Parallel TCP-Based Request-Response Streams , 2010, 2010 7th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference.

[10]  Shay Kutten,et al.  Optimal allocation of electronic content , 2002, Comput. Networks.

[11]  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).

[12]  Michael Sirivianos,et al.  Inter-datacenter bulk transfers with netstitcher , 2011, SIGCOMM.

[13]  Bo Li,et al.  Scaling social media applications into geo-distributed clouds , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[14]  John V. Guttag,et al.  Power-demand routing in massive geo-distributed systems , 2010 .

[15]  Joseph Naor,et al.  Competitive Analysis via Regularization , 2014, SODA.

[16]  Nimbula Cloud Operating.  Intel® Cloud Builders Guide: Cloud Design and Deployment on Intel® Platforms , 2010 .

[17]  Prashant J. Shenoy,et al.  Energy-aware load balancing in content delivery networks , 2011, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[18]  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).

[19]  Keith W. Ross,et al.  Measuring and Evaluating Large-Scale CDNs , 2008 .

[20]  Pavlin Radoslavov,et al.  Topology-informed Internet replica placement , 2002, Comput. Commun..

[21]  Arun Venkataramani,et al.  Distributing content simplifies ISP traffic engineering , 2012, SIGMETRICS '13.

[22]  Novella Bartolini,et al.  Optimal dynamic replica placement in content delivery networks , 2003, The 11th IEEE International Conference on Networks, 2003. ICON2003..

[23]  Ben Y. Zhao,et al.  Understanding user behavior in large-scale video-on-demand systems , 2006, EuroSys.

[24]  Xiaozhe Wang,et al.  Intelligent web traffic mining and analysis , 2005, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[25]  Joseph Naor,et al.  The Design of Competitive Online Algorithms via a Primal-Dual Approach , 2009, Found. Trends Theor. Comput. Sci..

[26]  Lachlan L. H. Andrew,et al.  Dynamic Right-Sizing for Power-Proportional Data Centers , 2011, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[27]  Xiaoyuan Yang,et al.  Inter-datacenter bulk transfers with netstitcher , 2011 .

[28]  Alexander Rakhlin,et al.  Lecture Notes on Online Learning DRAFT , 2009 .

[29]  Katherine Guo,et al.  Intra-cloud lightning: Building CDNs in the cloud , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[30]  Zahir Tari,et al.  MetaCDN: Harnessing 'Storage Clouds' for high performance content delivery , 2009, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[31]  Stephen P. Boyd,et al.  Convex Optimization , 2004, Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook.