Improving content delivery using provider-aided distance information

Abstract

Content delivery systems constitute a major portion of today's Internet traffic. While they are a good source of revenue for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the huge volume of content delivery traffic also poses a significant burden and traffic engineering challenge for the ISP. The difficulty is due to the immense volume of transfers, while the traffic engineering challenge stems from the fact that most content delivery systems themselves utilize a distributed infrastructure. They perform their own traffic flow optimization and realize this using the DNS system. While content delivery systems may, to some extent, consider the user's performance within their optimization criteria, they currently have no incentive to consider any of the ISP's constraints. As a consequence, the ISP has "lost control" over a major part of its traffic. To overcome this impairment, we propose a solution where the ISP offers a Provideraided Distance Information System (PaDIS). PaDIS uses information available only to the ISP to rank any client-host pair based on distance information, such as delay, bandwidth or number of hops.In this paper we show that the applicability of the system is significant. More than 70% of the HTTP traffic of a major European ISP can be accessed via multiple different locations. Moreover, we show that deploying PaDIS is not only beneficial to ISPs, but also to users. Experiments with different content providers show that improvements in download times of up to a factor of four are possible. Furthermore, we describe a high performance implementation of PaDIS and show how it can be deployed within an ISP.

Characterizing the file hosting ecosystem: A view from the edge

“…Figure 7(a) shows the distribution of the campus traffic volume across the 15 mirrors. RapidShare allows a user to choose any of these 15 mirrors or to rely on the built-in system to choose the best mirror based on the peering arrangement of the RapidShare mirror with that of the end user's ISP [26]. A large fraction of the download traffic is delivered from Level 3 and TeliaSonera.…”

Slowing down to speed up: Protecting users against massive attacks in content distribution systems

“…Ao invés de manter entidades centralizadoras para distribuir conteúdos, sistemas P2P são criados para que peers interajam para compartilhar dados e maximizar a utilização dos seus recursos. Nesse contexto, a popularização das arquiteturas P2P motivou a comunidade científica a investigar alguns aspectos de pesquisa desafiadores, e.g., otimização de topologias de redes (CHOFFNES; BUSTAMANTE, 2008;SÁNCHEZ;BUSTAMANTE, 2010;POESE et al, 2010;CAPOTA et al, 2011), mecanismos de inicialização de sistemas (TADDIA; MAZZINI, 2008) e serviços de descoberta de recursos (IAMNITCHI; FOSTER, 2001). Um desafio com interesse especial a esta tese diz respeito a mecanismos para conciliar a preferência dos usuários aos conteúdos publicados.…”

“…Instead of maintaining central entities to distribute content, P2P systems are designed so as peers can interact to share data and maximize their download bandwidth usage. The adoption of P2P architectures, in the context of CDS, has attracted attention from the scientific community to some interesting challenges, namely network topology optimization (CHOFFNES; BUSTAMANTE, 2008;SÁNCHEZ;BUSTAMANTE, 2010;POESE et al, 2010;CAPOTA et al, 2011), bootstrap mechanisms (TADDIA; MAZZINI, 2008), and service discovery (IAMNITCHI;FOSTER, 2001). One particular interesting challenge, in the context of this thesis, refers to mechanisms employed to match user's interests and published contents.…”

Optimizing cost and performance for content multihoming

“…The authors of [3,22,23,24] study how CDNs can utilize information on load of edge servers, network conditions, and locations/bandwidth of clients to improve CDN request routing. Our work complements these studies by optimizing the assignment of contents into CDNs.…”