The growing complexity of content delivery networks: Challenges and implications for the Internet ecosystem

Since the commercialization of the Internet, content and related applications, including video streaming, news, advertisements, and social interaction have moved online. It is broadly recognized that the rise of all of these different types of content (static and dynamic, and increasingly multimedia) has been one of the main forces behind the phenomenal growth of the Internet, and its emergence as essential infrastructure for how individuals across the globe gain access to the content sources they want. To accelerate the delivery of diverse content in the Internet and to provide commercial-grade performance for video delivery and the Web, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) were introduced. This paper describes the current CDN ecosystem and the forces that have driven its evolution. We outline the different CDN architectures and consider their relative strengths and weaknesses. Our analysis highlights the role of location, the growing complexity of the CDN ecosystem, and their relationship to and implications for interconnection markets.EC/H2020/679158/EU/Resolving the Tussle in the Internet: Mapping, Architecture, and Policy Making/ResolutioNe

iTeleScope: Intelligent Video Telemetry and Classification in Real-Time using Software Defined Networking

Video continues to dominate network traffic, yet operators today have poor visibility into the number, duration, and resolutions of the video streams traversing their domain. Current approaches are inaccurate, expensive, or unscalable, as they rely on statistical sampling, middle-box hardware, or packet inspection software. We present {\em iTelescope}, the first intelligent, inexpensive, and scalable SDN-based solution for identifying and classifying video flows in real-time. Our solution is novel in combining dynamic flow rules with telemetry and machine learning, and is built on commodity OpenFlow switches and open-source software. We develop a fully functional system, train it in the lab using multiple machine learning algorithms, and validate its performance to show over 95\% accuracy in identifying and classifying video streams from many providers including Youtube and Netflix. Lastly, we conduct tests to demonstrate its scalability to tens of thousands of concurrent streams, and deploy it live on a campus network serving several hundred real users. Our system gives unprecedented fine-grained real-time visibility of video streaming performance to operators of enterprise and carrier networks at very low cost.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figure

Elastic Provisioning of Cloud Caches: a Cost-aware TTL Approach

We consider elastic resource provisioning in the cloud, focusing on in-memory key-value stores used as caches. Our goal is to dynamically scale resources to the traffic pattern minimizing the overall cost, which includes not only the storage cost, but also the cost due to misses. In fact, a small variation on the cache miss ratio may have a significant impact on user perceived performance in modern web services, which in turn has an impact on the overall revenues for the content provider that uses those services. We propose and study a dynamic algorithm for TTL caches, which is able to obtain close-to-minimal costs. Since high-throughput caches require low complexity operations, we discuss a practical implementation of such a scheme requiring constant overhead per request independently from the cache size. We evaluate our solution with real-world traces collected from Akamai, and show that we are able to obtain a 17% decrease in the overall cost compared to a baseline static configuration

WARP: A ICN architecture for social data

Social network companies maintain complete visibility and ownership of the data they store. However users should be able to maintain full control over their content. For this purpose, we propose WARP, an architecture based upon Information-Centric Networking (ICN) designs, which expands the scope of the ICN architecture beyond media distribution, to provide data control in social networks. The benefit of our solution lies in the lightweight nature of the protocol and in its layered design. With WARP, data distribution and access policies are enforced on the user side. Data can still be replicated in an ICN fashion but we introduce control channels, named \textit{thread updates}, which ensures that the access to the data is always updated to the latest control policy. WARP decentralizes the social network but still offers APIs so that social network providers can build products and business models on top of WARP. Social applications run directly on the user's device and store their data on the user's \textit{butler} that takes care of encryption and distribution. Moreover, users can still rely on third parties to have high-availability without renouncing their privacy

Video-on-Demand over Internet: a survey of existing systems and solutions

Video-on-Demand is a service where movies are delivered to distributed users with low delay and free interactivity. The traditional client/server architecture experiences scalability issues to provide video streaming services, so there have been many proposals of systems, mostly based on a peer-to-peer or on a hybrid server/peer-to-peer solution, to solve this issue. This work presents a survey of the currently existing or proposed systems and solutions, based upon a subset of representative systems, and defines selection criteria allowing to classify these systems. These criteria are based on common questions such as, for example, is it video-on-demand or live streaming, is the architecture based on content delivery network, peer-to-peer or both, is the delivery overlay tree-based or mesh-based, is the system push-based or pull-based, single-stream or multi-streams, does it use data coding, and how do the clients choose their peers. Representative systems are briefly described to give a summarized overview of the proposed solutions, and four ones are analyzed in details. Finally, it is attempted to evaluate the most promising solutions for future experiments. Résumé La vidéo à la demande est un service où des films sont fournis à distance aux utilisateurs avec u

Re-designing Dynamic Content Delivery in the Light of a Virtualized Infrastructure

We explore the opportunities and design options enabled by novel SDN and NFV technologies, by re-designing a dynamic Content Delivery Network (CDN) service. Our system, named MOSTO, provides performance levels comparable to that of a regular CDN, but does not require the deployment of a large distributed infrastructure. In the process of designing the system, we identify relevant functions that could be integrated in the future Internet infrastructure. Such functions greatly simplify the design and effectiveness of services such as MOSTO. We demonstrate our system using a mixture of simulation, emulation, testbed experiments and by realizing a proof-of-concept deployment in a planet-wide commercial cloud system.Comment: Extended version of the paper accepted for publication in JSAC special issue on Emerging Technologies in Software-Driven Communication - November 201

Distributed Client/Server Architecture With Dynamic Middle Tier

Widespread use of computer networks and the demanding needs of current network applications and technology impose a challenge to use the bandwidths in an efficient manner so as to solve the network congestion and server overloading problems. Some past and on-going solutions such as server replications and caching have been proposed to overcome these deficiencies. However, these solutions have not been implemented in an economical and configuration-transparent manner. Moreover, the problems of caching and disseminating real-time multimedia data in a bandwidth-conservative manner have not been addressed. In this thesis, a CHEK Proxy Framework (CPF) has been developed using a proxy solution to address these problems. By caching, proxy has become a traditional solution in reducing user-perceived latency and network resource requirements in the network. CPF helps to create a middle-tier application platform proxy transparently and dynamically in the client sub-network to execute the sharable section of any server application codes. This is as the application proxy. Besides caching static web contents, this local application proxy helps to deliver real-time multimedia data on behalf of the remote server with lower bandwidth and better performance. CPF helps to minimize WAN connections while maximizing LAN interactions by multiplexing and de-multiplexing client requests through to the server via the proxy. As a result, the central server is made more reliable and scalable. The monitoring and management of the CHEK distributed objects is also made easier through the use of the CHEK Management Console (CMC). CMC displays the inter-relationships between the distributed objects and their status information on a GUI-based control panel for ease of management. With its dynamic and transparent features, software verslOrung and maintenance problems are readily overcome. CPF has been shown to be useful in most client/server applications, particularly those of broadcasting and collaborative nature such as video broadcastings and chat systems. CPF solves the network congestion and server overloading problems with the presence of a middle-tier proxy application platform which is allocated in the client sub-network with no manual configurations