In a Telco-CDN, Pushing Content Makes Sense

Zhe Li (1, 2) , Gwendal Simon (1, 2)

1 RSM - Département Réseaux, Sécurité et Multimédia
2 REOP - Réseaux d'opérateurs

The exploding HD video streaming traffic calls for deploying content servers deeper inside network operators' infrastructures. Telco-CDN are new content distribution services that are managed by Internet Service Providers (ISP). Since the network operator controls both the infrastructure and the content delivery overlay, it is in a position to engineer telco-CDN so that networking resources are optimally utilized. In this paper, we show the following two findings: 1. it is possible to implement an efficient algorithm for the placement of video chunks into a telco-CDN. We present an algorithm, which is based on a genetic algorithm implemented on the MapReduce framework. We show that, for a national VoD service, computing a quasi- optimal placement is possible. 2. such push strategy makes sense because it allows to actually take into account fine-grain traffic management strategies on the underlying infrastructure. Our proposal re-opens the debate about the relevance of such "push" approach (where the manager of telco-CDN proactively pushes video content into servers) versus the traditional caching approach (where the content is pulled to the servers from requests of clients). Our proposal of a quasi-optimal tracker enables fair comparisons between both approaches for most traffic engineering policies. We illustrate the interest of our proposal in the context of a major European Telco-CDN with real traces from a popular Video-on-Demand (VoD) service. Our experimental results show that, given a perfect algorithm for predicting user preferences, our placement algorithm is able to keep aligned with LRU caching in terms of the traditional hit- ratio, but the workload on some troubled links (e.g., over-used links) in a push-based strategy is significantly alleviated.

Mots clés: Video services; Genetic algorithms; Network optimization

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Zhe Li, Gwendal Simon. In a Telco-CDN, Pushing Content Makes Sense. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2013, 10 (3), pp.300-311. ⟨10.1109/TNSM.2013.043013.130474⟩. ⟨hal-00908767⟩