Akamai Technologies

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) deliver much of the world’s web, video, and application content on the Internet today. A key component of a CDN is the mapping system that uses the DNS protocol to route each client’s request to a “proximal” server that serves the requested content. While traditional mapping systems identify a client using the IP of its name server, we describe our experience in building and rolling-out a novel system called end-user mapping that identifies the client directly by using a prefix of the client’s IP ad-dress. Using measurements from Akamai’s production net-work during the roll-out, we show that end-user mapping provides significant performance benefits for clients who use public resolvers, including an eight-fold decrease in map-ping distance, a two-fold decrease in RTT and content down-load time, and a 30 % improvement in the time-to-first-byte. We also quantify the scaling challenges in implementing end-user mapping such as the 8-fold increase in DNS queries. Fi-nally, we show that a CDN with a larger number of deploy-ment locations is likely to benefit more from end-user map-ping than a CDN with a smaller number of deployments. 1