Redesigning CDN-Broker Interactions for Improved Content Delivery

@inproceedings{2017-Mukerjee-conext,
    author = "Mukerjee, Matthew K. and Bozkurt, Ilker Nadi and Ray, Devdeep and Maggs, Bruce M. and Seshan, Srinivasan and Zhang, Hui",
    title = "Redesigning CDN-Broker Interactions for Improved Content Delivery",
    year = "2017",
    month = "November",
    isbn = "9781450354226",
    publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
    address = "New York, NY, USA",
    url = "https://doi.org/10.1145/3143361.3143366",
    doi = "10.1145/3143361.3143366",
    abstract = "Various trends are reshaping Internet video delivery: exponential growth in video traffic, rising expectations of high video quality of experience (QoE), and the proliferation of varied content delivery network (CDN) deployments (e.g., cloud computing-based, content provider-owned datacenters, and ISP-owned CDNs). More fundamentally though, content providers are shifting delivery from a single CDN to multiple CDNs, through the use of a content broker. Brokers have been shown to invalidate many traditional delivery assumptions (e.g., shifting traffic invalidates short- and long-term traffic prediction) by not communicating their decisions with CDNs. In this work, we analyze these problems using data from a CDN and a broker. We examine the design space of potential solutions, finding that a marketplace design (inspired by advertising exchanges) potentially provides interesting tradeoffs. A marketplace allows all CDNs to profit on video delivery through fine-grained pricing and optimization, where CDNs learn risk-adverse bidding strategies to aid in traffic prediction. We implement a marketplace-based system (which we dub Video Delivery eXchange or VDX) in CDN and broker data-driven simulation, finding significant improvements in cost and data-path distance.",
    booktitle = "ACM Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT)",
    pages = "68–80",
    numpages = "13",
    keywords = "content brokers, interfaces, CDNs, content delivery",
    location = "Incheon, Republic of Korea",
    award = "Best Paper Award",
    category = "Web/Video",
    series = "CoNEXT '17"
}