Evaluating the utility of content delivery networks
Kostas Stamos, George Pallis, Athena I. Vakali, Marios D. Dikaiakos · 2009
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) balance costs and qual-ity in services related to content delivery. This has urged many Web entrepreneurs to make contracts with CDNs. In the literature, a wide range of techniques has been devel-oped, implemented and standardized for improving the per-formance of CDNs. The ultimate goal of all the approaches is to improve the utility of CDN surrogate servers. In this paper we define a metric which measures the utility of CDN surrogate servers, called CDN utility. This metric captures the traffic activity in a CDN, expressing the usefulness of surrogate servers in terms of data circulation in the net-work. Through an extensive simulation testbed, we identify the parameters that affect the CDN utility in such infras-tructures. We evaluate the utility of surrogate servers under various parameters and provide insightful comments.