Resource Reservation and Request Routing for a Cloud-Based Content Delivery Network

摘要

Content delivery networks (CDNs) built on clouds constitute a promising content-distribution-as-a-service alternative. Exploiting the advantages of the cloud, such as the pay-as-you-go business model and geographical dispersion of resources, a cloud-based CDN can provide a flexible and cost-effective solution to realize content delivery without investments on installing and maintaining the infrastructures. However, resource reservation and request routing are critical issues to be addressed in such systems due to the geographical diversity of cloud resource prices and the dynamic nature of traffic demands. In this paper, we investigate the optimal resource reservation problem of cloud resources and explore the best trade-off between rental cost and user experience, and formulate the problem and develop a heuristic approach for it. To deal with fluctuating user demands, we further investigate the request routing optimization problem and design an online heuristic algorithm to redirect user requests. The simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms.