Optimization in Content Distribution Networks
Tiago Araújo Neves, Luiz Satoru Ochi, Eduardo Uchoa · 2008
Content Distribution Networks (CDN) are overlay networks used to place content near end clients with the aim at reducing delay, servers load and network congestion, hence improving the service quality perceived by end clients. In traditional CDN architectures, clients requests are initially received by a central server and then redirected to another server that is close to the client and that is able to handle the request. However, in some cases, clients requests will not be served by the closest server. It may be advantageous to use a server that is a further away but that is not as loaded as the closest one. Contents in CDN are replicated, in many cases, according to contractual clauses, because of the costs involved in the maintenance of such replicated contents. Therefore, some contents are not replicated through the entire overlay network of the CDN provider. In this work a exact and heuristic approaches are presented in order to solve an optimization problem related to CDN management, called the Replica Placement Problem. This problem consists in finding