Pushing CDN-ISP collaboration to the limit ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2013
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Today a spectrum of solutions are available for distributing content over the
Internet, ranging from commercial CDNs to ISP-operated CDNs to
content-provider-operated CDNs to peer-to-peer CDNs. Some deploy servers in
just a few large data centers while others deploy in thousands of locations or
even on millions of desktops. Recently, major CDNs have formed strategic
alliances with large ISPs to provide content delivery network solutions. Such
alliances show the natural evolution of content delivery today driven by the
need to address scalability issues and to take advantage of new technology and
business opportunities.
In this paper we revisit the design and operating space of CDN-ISP collaboration in light of recent ISP and CDN alliances. We identify two key enablers for supporting collaboration and improving content delivery performance: informed end-user to server assignment and in-network server allocation. We report on the design and evaluation of a prototype system, NetPaaS, that materializes them. Relying on traces from the largest commercial CDN and a large tier-1 ISP, we show that NetPaaS is able to increase CDN capacity on-demand, enable coordination, reduce download time, and achieve multiple traffic engineering goals leading to a win-win situation for both ISP and CDN. |