Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 12Beyond CDN: Content Processing at the Edge of the Cloud

Salekul Islam¹ and Jean-Charles Grégoire²

¹United International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

²INRS-EMT, Montréal, QC, Canada

12.1 Introduction

Over the years, the content delivery network (CDN) [1, 2] has evolved to become a well-established technology for delivering a wide range of content including Web objects (e.g., text, graphics, uniform resource locators (URLs), and scripts), downloadable objects (e.g., media files, software, and documents), applications (e.g., e-commerce and portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, social networks, and so on. Although CDNs deliver content to end-users with high availability and performance, they fail to meet the more recent, quickly increasing demand of multimedia functions on the delivery/server side [3, 4]. Multimedia processing includes a large spectrum of multimedia functions including transcoding, delivery of interactive media, mixing different streams, dynamically modifying the resolution according to the user equipment, scaling down/up with respect to the number of customers, custom mashups, and so on.

On the other hand, cloud computing—a collection of applications, hardware, and system software—has become the technology of choice to deliver services to end-users over the Internet [5]. The datacenter that deploys the necessary hardware and software is the essence of the cloud. Cloud computing offers a wide range of services, including computing, ...