Flexible transport services for emerging opportunities in Internet content delivery
John W. Byers · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2001
The emergence of new technologies for Internet content delivery including CDNs, end system multicast, peer-to-peer content exchange (e.g. Napster) and application-level anycast are fundamentally changing the relationships between consumers and producers of digital content. These new technologies enable delivery mechanisms which go far beyond point-to-point connections between a client and a single origin server. For example, CDNs redirect clients to a number of equivalent replica servers, while end system multicast blurs the distinction between client and server by requiring that every participant who wishes to access content serve content as well. In this position paper, we motivate and describe scalable strategies for addressing the challenges and opportunities that distributed content distribution mechanisms will place on reliable transport protocols and distributed scheduling algorithms. Central to our discussion are lightweight reliable transport services designed for maximum flexibility which can accomodate connection preemption, connection migration and connection aggregation built in part on fast forward error correcting (FFEC) codes.