Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Preface

The ever-evolving nature of the Internet brings new challenges in managing and delivering content to end-users. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) improve Web access and streaming performance, in terms of response time and system throughput, while delivering content to Internet end-users through multiple, geographically distributed edge servers. The CDN industry, that is, content delivery, consumption, and monetization, has been undergoing rapid changes. The multidimensional surge in content delivery from end-users has led to an explosion of new content, formats, and an exponential increase in the size and complexity of the digital content supply chain. These changes have been accelerated by economic downturn in that the content providers are under increasing pressure to reduce costs while increasing revenue.

The main value proposition for CDN services has shifted over time. Initially, the focus was on improving end-user-perceived experience by decreasing response time, especially when the customer website experiences unexpected traffic surges. Nowadays, CDN services are treated by content providers as a way to use a shared infrastructure to handle their peak capacity requirements, thus allowing reduced investment cost in their own hosting infrastructure. Moreover, recent trends in CDNs indicate a large paradigm shift toward a utility computing model, which allows customers to exploit advanced content delivery services, hosted on commodity hardware, without having to build ...