SoR based request routing for future CDN

Abstract

Internet users are constantly demanding faster and higher quality services from their internet service providers. This results an increase in broadband services, and access to delivery of applications enriched in data become top priority. Therefore, for fast delivery of such applications, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have been introduced. The Internet has become a massive system consisting of enormous amounts of information. To maintain the rich information in the Internet and to achieve maximum benefit from networks, Service-oriented Routers (SoRs) have been introduced. A SoR has a high-throughput database and is able to analyze all transactions on its interfaces. In addition, SoRs can provide APIs for accessing stored contents in order to enrich services. CDNs generally use Request Routing (RR) methods to achieve low user latency by performing load balancing among servers. RR is accomplished by selecting the nearest server for a particular user. In this paper we implement a new RR infrastructure that is based on the content of packet streams. The proposed system is independent of DNS-based RR, which is the predominant RR method used by current CDN infrastructures. In our system, content-centric request re-routing with SoR is used. Experimental evaluation and comparison of the round trip time (RTT) result of our proposed system with DNS-based RR indicates that our system achieves 50-60% reduction in connection initiation time. The SoR based RR method is able to reroute packets without disturbing clients, which is not possible using existing RR methods. This feature will make future CDNs more effective and convenient.