Striking a balance between the costs for Web content providers and the quality of service for Web customers. More efficient content delivery over the Web has become an important element of improving Web performance. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have been proposed to maximize bandwidth, improve accessibility, and maintain correctness through content replication [11]. With CDNs, content is distributed to cache servers located close to users, resulting in fast, reliable applications and Web services for the users. More specifically, CDNs maintain multiple Points of Presence (PoP) with clusters of (the so-called surrogate) servers that store copies of identical content, such that users ’ requests are satisfied by the most appropriate site (see the figure here). Typically, a CDN topology involves: • A set of surrogate servers (distributed around the world) that cache the origin servers ’ content; • Routers and network elements that deliver

Replication is a well-known technique to improve the accessibility of Web sites. It generally offers reduced client latencies and increases a site’s availability. However, applying replication techniques is not trivial, and various Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have been created to facilitate replication for digital content providers. The

Data replication is used extensively in wide-area distributed systems to achieve low data-access latency. A large number of heuristics have been proposed to perform replica placement. Practical experience indicates that the choice of heuristic makes a big difference in terms of the cost of required infrastructure (e.g., storage capacity and network bandwidth), depending on system topology, workload and performance goals.

This paper introduces a framework for evaluating replica placement algorithms (RPA) for content delivery networks (CDN) as well as RPAs from other fields that might be applicable to current or future CDNs. First, the framework classifies and qualitatively compares RPAs using a generic set of primitives that capture problem definitions and heuristics. Second, it provides estimates for the decision times of RPAs using an analytic model. To achieve accuracy, the model takes into account disk accesses and message sizes, in addition to computational complexity and message numbers that have been considered traditionally. Third, it uses the "goodness" of produced placements to compare RPAs even when they have different problem definitions. Based on these evaluations, we identify open issues and potential areas for future research.

Numerous replica placement algorithms have been proposed in the literature for use in content delivery networks. However, little has been done to compare the various placement algorithms against each other and against caching. This paper debates whether we need replica placement algorithms in content delivery networks or not.

Accurate measurement of network bandwidth is crucial for network management applications as well as flexible Internet applications and protocols which actively manage and dynamically adapt to changing utilization of network resources. Extensive work has focused on two approaches to measuring bandwidth: measuring it hop-by-hop, and measuring it end-toend along a path. Unfortunately, best-practice techniques for the former are inefficient, and techniques for the latter are only able to observe bottlenecks visible at end-to-end scope. In this paper, we develop end-to-end probing methods which can measure bottleneck bandwidth along arbitrary, targeted subpaths of a path in the network, including subpaths shared byasetofflows.We evaluate our technique through extensive ns simulations, then provide a comparative Internet perfomance evaluation against hop-by-hop techniques. We also describe a number of applications which we foresee as standing to benefit from solutions to this problem, ranging from network troubleshooting and capacity provisioning to optimizing the layout of application-level overlay networks to optimized replica placement.

We introduce and evaluate a middleware clustering technology capable of allocating resources to web applications through dynamic application instance placement. We define application instance placement as the problem of placing application instances on a given set of server machines to adjust the amount of resources available to applications in response to varying resource demands of application clusters. The objective is to maximize the amount of demand that may be satisfied using a configured placement. To limit the disturbance to the system caused by starting and stopping application instances, the placement algorithm attempts to minimize the number of placement changes. It also strives to keep resource utilization balanced across all server machines. Two types of resources are managed, one load-dependent and one load-independent. When putting the chosen placement in effect our controller schedules placement changes in a manner that limits the disruption to the system.

To distribute video and audio data in real-time streaming mode, both CDN (Content Distributed Network) based and peer-to-peer based architectures have been proposed. However, each architecture has its limitations. CDN servers are expensive to deploy and maintain. The storage space and out-bound bandwidth allocated to each media file are limited and incur a cost. Current solutions to lowering such cost usually compromise the media quality delivered. On the other hand, a peer-to-peer architecture needs a sufficient number of `seed' supplying peers to `jumpstart' the system. Compared with a CDN server, a peer offers very low out-bound bandwidth. Furthermore, it is not clear how to fairly determine the contribution of each supplying peer.

With the dramatic explosion of online information, the Internet is undergoing a transition from a data communication infrastructure to a global information utility. PDAs, wireless phones, webenabled vehicles, modem PCs and high-end workstations can be viewed as appliances that "plugin " to this utility for information. The increasing diversity of such appliances calls for an architecture for performance differentiation of information access. The key performance accelerator on the Internet is the caching and content distribution infrastructure. While many research efforts addressed performance differentiation in the network and on web servers, providing multiple levels of service in the caching system has received much less attention.

Internet evolves and operates largely without a central coordination, the lack of which was and is critically important to the rapid growth and evolution of Internet. However, the lack of management in turn makes it very difficult to guarantee proper performance and to deal systematically with performance problems. Meanwhile, the available network bandwidth and server capacity continue to be overwhelmed by the skyrocketing Internet utilization and the accelerating growth of bandwidth intensive content. As a result, Internet service quality perceived by customers is largely unpredictable and unsatisfactory. Content Distribution Network (CDN) is an e ective approach to improve Internet service quality. CDN replicates the content from the place of origin to the replica servers scattered over the Internet and serves a request from a replica server close to where the request originates. In this paper, we first give an overview about CDN. We then present the critical issues involved in designing and implementing an effective CDN and survey the approaches proposed in literature to address these problems. An example of CDN is described to show how a real commercial CDN operates. After this, we present a scheme that provides fast service location for peer-to-peer systems, a special type of CDN with no infrastructure support. We conclude with a brief projection about CDN.