From content distribution networks to content networks — issues and challenges

Abstract

Due to the technical developments in electronics the amount of digital content is continuously increasing. In order to make digital content respectively multimedia content available to potentially large and geographically distributed consumer populations, Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) are used. The main task of current CDNs is the efficient delivery and increased availability of content to the consumer. This area has been subject to research for several years. Modern CDN solutions aim to additionally automate the CDN management. Furthermore, modern applications do not just perform retrieval or access operations on content, but also create content, modify content, actively place content at appropriate locations of the infrastructure, etc. If these operations are also supported by the distribution infrastructure, we call the infrastructure Content Networks (CN) instead of CDN. In order to solve the major challenges of future CNs, researchers from different communities have to collaborate, based on a common terminology. It is the aim of this paper, to contribute to such a terminology, to summarize the state-of-the-art, and to highlight and discuss some grand challenges for CNs that we have identified. Our conception of these challenges is supported by the answers to a questionnaire we received from many leading European research groups in the field. q

Distributed Placement of Autonomic Internet Services

“…the network would not be justified 1 . We assume that the network topology is represented by an undirected connected graph G = (V, E) of |V | nodes and |E| links.…”

“…This implies an implicit logical hierarchy in the role of network nodes, which in many cases is not present. Moreover, given that (minor) user demand shifts or network topology changes 1. For instance, a customized tour service generated by a mashup tool user to provide urban points of a certain interest, would most likely be accessed only by those who share that interest and reside in the same area.…”

“…Message header parsing and demand mapping under SP (DeMaSP) 1. input: set of selected nodes in G Host , 2.…”

Recent advances in multimedia networking

“…CDNs are playing an important role in future multimedia networking and have evolved in recent years from infrastructures for Web documents to systems that support multimedia content and different forms of delivery such as streaming and Video on Demand (VoD) [28]. Traditionally, caching and replication techniques are used by CDNs to make content more widely accessible, distribute system load away from bottleneck servers and enable the overall system to react to changes in content popularity [21,40].…”

Estudio, análisis y desarrollo de una red de distribución de contenido y su algoritmo de redirección de usuarios para servicios web y streaming

“…Este apartado examina los problemas que condujeron a la emergencia de estas redes y presenta algunas soluciones en términos de tecnologías y servicios que conforman una red de contenido. Es más, estas redes de contenido se pueden basar en servicios de CDNs para distribuir y gestionar el contenido dentro de la red [Plag_06].…”