Distributing content simplifies ISP traffic engineering

  • Authors:
  • Abhigyan Sharma;Arun Venkataramani;Ramesh K. Sitaraman

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS/international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Several major Internet service providers today also offer content distribution services. The emergence of such "network-CDNs" (NCDNs) is driven both by market forces as well as the cost of carrying ever-increasing volumes of traffic across their backbones. An NCDN has the flexibility to determine both where content is placed and how traffic is routed within the network. However NCDNs today continue to treat traffic engineering independently from content placement and request redirection decisions. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between content distribution strategies and traffic engineering and ask whether or how an NCDN should address these concerns in a joint manner. Our experimental analysis, based on traces from a large content distribution network and real ISP topologies, shows that realistic (i.e., history-based) joint optimization strategies offer little benefit (and often significantly underperform) compared to simple and "unplanned" strategies for routing and placement such as InverseCap and LRU. We also find that the simpler strategies suffice to achieve network cost and user-perceived latencies close to those of a joint-optimal strategy with future knowledge.