Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 10Analyzing Content Delivery Networks

Benjamin Molina¹, Jaime Calvo², Carlos E. Palau¹, and Manuel Esteve¹

¹Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain

²Universidad de Salamanca, Escuela Politecnica Superior de Zamora, Zamora, Spaina

10.1 Introduction

Internet continues growing in terms of users and services. Traditional pages with text and images provide little value to demanding users who increasingly require the integration of services such as multimedia, privacy, and personalization. Thus, it requires some intelligence in the systems or networks that offer such services, which is often implemented at the application layer because of its greater flexibility compared with network-based solutions. Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a scalable solution in providing all types of content to users. CDNs initially emerged as a method of reducing the latency of accessing Web objects, but their applicability has been extended to multimedia (both video and audio streaming) and mobile applications where the temporary requirements and relationships are more demanding and perceptible.

CDNs minimize delay reducing the communication path over the Internet; therefore, multiple servers are placed at the edges of the network and in the vicinity of the customers, following the concept of CEN (content edge networking). This simple idea represents a technological challenge in the deployment of the network infrastructure, and the necessary intelligence to offer content delivery ...