Router-based request redirection management for a next-generation content distribution network

Abstract

The increase in the amount of digital data transferred between contents Servers and Clients in a network causes problems created by congestion when downloading big web files, streaming media, etc. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are introduced to overcome such problems by redirecting the Clients request to the nearest Server. However, as the number of people accessing Internet increases rapidly, the performance of CDN is reduced, resulting in network congestion at times. To solve these problems, we propose an architecture in which a new management method is employed to redirect the Clients request using a content-based Router called the Service-oriented Router (SoR). This method is more effective than the currently implemented, traditional DNS-based request redirection (RR). The SoR is a special router that can perform a deep packet inspection of the packet streams. Our experiments were based on analytical modeling as well as test bed experiments, and they confirmed that the response time in the Router-based RR was less than that in the DNS-based RR by 23.3%. In addition, our test bed experiments showed that the RTT in the Router-based RR is less than that in the DNS-based RR by 7.7%.