The Impact of Brokers on the Future of Content Delivery

Mukerjee, Matthew K.; Bozkurt, Ilker Nadi; Maggs, Bruce M.; Seshan, Srinivasan; Zhang, Hui

doi:10.1145/3005745.3005749

Cited by 16 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Nevertheless, we find, similar to Xue, partly suboptimal performance in terms of latency, yet, we acknowledge that routing decisions may have other goals than latency. This argument is reinforced by Mukerjee et al [16], which is closest to our work. They analyze the effect of brokers, i.e., CDN selectors, on CDNs, characterize potential problems and propose a new interface between these brokers and CDNs.…”

Section: Background and Related Worksupporting

confidence: 90%

“…selector [23] and has similarities to auction-based CDN brokers [16]. Since the individual routing approaches employed by content providers at the Meta-CDN are unknown to the involved CDIs, directed traffic and thus generated revenue gets harder to predict.…”

Section: Characterizing a Meta-cdnmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Concerning Internetusers, performance-based routing decisions can yield better Internet performance and benefit end-users while cost-based decisions can have other effects (as for any server selection approach run by CDNs). While the concept is known and related work covering service specific implementations, i.e., Conviva's streaming platform [4,10,16], exists, the empirical understanding of a generic Meta-CDN and its operation in practice is still limited. We posit that this understanding is necessary.In this paper, we thus shed light on the Meta-CDN operation by dissecting the Cedexis Meta-CDN as a prominent example that is used by major Internet companies such as Microsoft (Windows Update and parts of the XBox Live Network), Air France, and LinkedIn [1].…”

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confidence: 99%

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Characterizing a Meta-CDN

Hohlfeld

Rüth

Wolsing

et al. 2018

Passive and Active Measurement

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CDNs have reshaped the Internet architecture at large. They operate (globally) distributed networks of servers to reduce latencies as well as to increase availability for content and to handle large traffic bursts. Traditionally, content providers were mostly limited to a single CDN operator. However, in recent years, more and more content providers employ multiple CDNs to serve the same content and provide the same services. Thus, switching between CDNs, which can be beneficial to reduce costs or to select CDNs by optimal performance in different geographic regions or to overcome CDN-specific outages, becomes an important task. Services that tackle this task emerged, also known as CDN broker, Multi-CDN selectors, or Meta-CDNs. Despite their existence, little is known about Meta-CDN operation in the wild. In this paper, we thus shed light on this topic by dissecting a major Meta-CDN. Our analysis provides insights into its infrastructure, its operation in practice, and its usage by Internet sites. We leverage PlanetLab and Ripe Atlas as distributed infrastructures to study how a Meta-CDN impacts the web latency. custom logic to direct traffic to a CDN that currently offers better performance and/or lower cost (e.g., at certain geographic regions or times). Since the routing approach employed by the Meta-CDN customers is unknown to the involved CDNs, directed traffic and thus generated revenue gets harder to predict. In particular, since decisions can be based on active performance measurements by the Meta-CDN, a (single) delivery of bad performance by the probed CDN can result in rerouting traffic to a competing CDN and thus losing revenue. Thus, while Meta-CDNs can offer cost and performance benefits to content providers, they also challenge CDN business models. Concerning Internetusers, performance-based routing decisions can yield better Internet performance and benefit end-users while cost-based decisions can have other effects (as for any server selection approach run by CDNs). While the concept is known and related work covering service specific implementations, i.e., Conviva's streaming platform [4,10,16], exists, the empirical understanding of a generic Meta-CDN and its operation in practice is still limited. We posit that this understanding is necessary.In this paper, we thus shed light on the Meta-CDN operation by dissecting the Cedexis Meta-CDN as a prominent example that is used by major Internet companies such as Microsoft (Windows Update and parts of the XBox Live Network), Air France, and LinkedIn [1]. Given its current adoption, understanding its functionality and its usage by customers provides a first step towards understanding currently unknown implications of Meta-CDNs on Internet operation. We thus investigate the infrastructure and services powering this Meta-CDN and provide insights about its operation in practice. We analyze for what kind of services, e.g., media, API backends, or bulk data transfers, customers utilize Cedexis and how different CDNs are employed. We further investigate how...

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Section: Background and Related Worksupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Characterizing a Meta-cdnmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Characterizing a Meta-CDN

Hohlfeld

Rüth

Wolsing

et al. 2018

Passive and Active Measurement

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“…Significant amounts of research have been given to finding streaming architectures capable of satisfying high bitrate and minimal rebuffering requirements at scale. CDN brokers such as Conviva [3] allow content producers to easily use multiple CDNs, and are becoming crucial to meet user demand [4]. Furthermore, the use of network assistance in CDNs has received significant attention recently as a method of directly providing network details to DASH players.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

CBA: Contextual Quality Adaptation for Adaptive Bitrate Video Streaming

Alt

Ballard

Steinmetz

et al. 2019

IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

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Recent advances in quality adaptation algorithms leave adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming architectures at a crossroads: When determining the sustainable video quality one may either rely on the information gathered at the client vantage point or on server and network assistance. The fundamental problem here is to determine how valuable either information is for the adaptation decision. This problem becomes particularly hard in future Internet settings such as Named Data Networking (NDN) where the notion of a network connection does not exist.In this paper, we provide a fresh view on ABR quality adaptation for QoE maximization, which we formalize as a decision problem under uncertainty, and for which we contribute a sparse Bayesian contextual bandit algorithm denoted CBA. This allows taking high-dimensional streaming context information, including client-measured variables and network assistance, to find online the most valuable information for the quality adaptation. Since sparse Bayesian estimation is computationally expensive, we develop a fast new inference scheme to support online video adaptation. We perform an extensive evaluation of our adaptation algorithm in the particularly challenging setting of NDN, where we use an emulation testbed to demonstrate the efficacy of CBA compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.

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“…We refer to CDN selecting infrastructures as Meta-CDN services. Known instances of third-party Meta-CDNs [15,22,23,30] provide services to implement custom and dynamic request mapping policies to direct traffic to the different CDNs. The characteristics of third-party Meta-CDNs have been studied in part on the example of Conviva [2,13,22] and Cedexis [17] as the prevalent operators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dissecting Apple's Meta-CDN during an iOS Update

Blendin¹,

Bendfeldt

Poese³

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018

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Content delivery networks (CDN) contribute more than 50% of today's Internet traffic. Meta-CDNs, an evolution of centrally controlled CDNs, promise increased flexibility by multihoming content. So far, efforts to understand the characteristics of Meta-CDNs focus mainly on third-party Meta-CDN services. A common, but unexplored, use case for Meta-CDNs is to use the CDNs mapping infrastructure to form self-operated Meta-CDNs integrating thirdparty CDNs. These CDNs assist in the build-up phase of a CDN's infrastructure or mitigate capacity shortages by offloading traffic. This paper investigates the Apple CDN as a prominent example of self-operated Meta-CDNs. We describe the involved CDNs, the request-mapping mechanism, and show the cache locations of the Apple CDN using measurements of more than 800 RIPE Atlas probes worldwide. We further measure its load-sharing behavior by observing a major iOS update in Sep. 2017, a significant event potentially reaching up to an estimated 1 billion iOS devices. Furthermore, by analyzing data from a European Eyeball ISP, we quantify thirdparty traffic offloading effects and find third-party CDNs increase their traffic by 438% while saturating seemingly unrelated links.

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The Impact of Brokers on the Future of Content Delivery

Cited by 16 publications

References 14 publications

Characterizing a Meta-CDN

Characterizing a Meta-CDN

CBA: Contextual Quality Adaptation for Adaptive Bitrate Video Streaming

Dissecting Apple's Meta-CDN during an iOS Update

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