Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 1Cloud-Based Content Delivery and Streaming

Mukaddim Pathan

Telstra Corporation Ltd., Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

1.1 Introduction

Over the last decade, end-users have been increasingly using the Internet to access not only typical websites but also high definition (HD) video and rich media content. While accessing the Web, end-users expect high bandwidth, improved performance, and low latency for the delivered content. End-users' requirements of high quality, consistent, dependable, responsive viewer experience can be characterized by faster loading Web pages, quick channel changes and downloads, fast-start video, and quality of experience (QoE) in mobile devices. Similarly, content providers require an efficient content delivery mechanism to increase growth and scale, reliability and performance, and engagement and reach, while decreasing cost, risk, and network load.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) [1–4] improve websites, streaming, and download performance of Internet content by end-users while reducing the cost to serve for content providers. A CDN is a collaborative collection of network elements spanning the Internet, where content is replicated over mirrored Web servers (i.e., point of presence (PoP), edge or replica servers), located at the edge of the Internet service providers' (ISPs') networks to which end-users are connected. As shown in Figure 1.1, content is served into the CDN once, then content is delivered to end-users from the edge servers rather ...