Peered-CDN through request routing peering system for Video-on-Demand

Abstract

Demand for videos delivered through Internet increased rapidly in recent years. In order to reduce the workload for origin server and to increase the reliability of video delivered, a dedicated content delivery network (CDN) is needed. CDN, these days, could provide a reliable network to deliver videos, often representing the origin server, to serve clients' request. Request routing peering system usually are able to route clients' request to an 'appropriate' server, named as surrogate server, within a CDN. However, due to the cost involved for setting up new surrogate server, as the number of client increases, herewith, peering of CDN is being introduced to increase the capacity and the coverage, i.e. collaborating with several CDN. Our idea is to re-route a request to other CDNs when the request for a video in a particular CDN could not be found. In this paper, we also analyze the performance of such request routing system which is based on two policies, namely; (1) closest surrogate server, and (2) workload balance, in order to re-route requests to a 'suitable' surrogate server, thus, providing a stably high throughput with low error rate when delivering videos to clients. The simulation results show that closest surrogate server policy performed better during non-peak hour while workload balance policy performed better during peak hour.