Which CDN to Download From? A Client and Server Strategies
Abdelhak Bentaleb, Reza Farahani, Farzad Tashtarian, Hermann Hellwagner, Roger Zimmermann · 2023
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) has been evolved to enable different video streaming services to deliver media content over the Internet with less latency and improved quality. However, using only a single CDN is highly vulnerable to outages and crashes, resulting in a poor viewer experience. Regardless of viewers, traffic, or media content, a single CDN will be never sufficient to satisfy viewers' quality of experience (QoE) requirements. To avoid single CDN issues, leveraging multiple CDNs from multiple providers, refers to multi-CDN, helps in improving performance, increasing geographic coverage, and alleviating outages. An essential part in multi-CDN solutions is the decision to select the best performing CDN in real-time, depending on periodic measurements of CDNs and video players. While multi-CDN architecture provides tremendous benefits, it has not been well investigated and integrated with the industry. This paper highlights various decision strategies for real-time CDN selection that helps content providers select the right solution aligned with their goals and business.