Insight and perspectives for content delivery networks
Communications of the ACM - Personal information management
Modeling and Optimization for the Design of IMS Networks
ANSS '06 Proceedings of the 39th annual Symposium on Simulation
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Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) intelligently cache content on behalf of content providers and deliver this content to end users. New services have been rolled out recently by CDNs that enable content providers to deliver entire web sites from the distributed CDN servers. Using analytical models, we address the optimal pricing of these services.Our results suggest that, consistent with industry practices, CDN pricing functions should provide volume discounts to content providers. They also show that the most likely subscribers to CDN services are those content providers with high volume of traffic and with content having low security requirements. Significantly, our model also shows that larger CDN networks can charge higher prices in equilibrium, which should strengthen any technology-based economies of scale and make it more difficult for entrants to compete against incumbent firms. We find that CDNs will have to lower prices in light of increasing security concerns associated with content delivery. Alternatively, they will need to invest indeveloping and deploying technology to alleviate the security concerns. Finally, we find that declining bandwidth costs will negatively impact CDN revenues and profits.