Improving Content Delivery with PaDIS

Today, a large fraction of Internet traffic is due to Content Delivery Networks (CDN). To cope with the increasing de-mand for content CDNs deploy massively distributed infras-tructures. Moreover, to minimize their cost, content delivery networks perform their own traffic optimization by assign-ing end-users to their servers. Such an assignment is at large unaware of the network conditions and based on inaccurate information on the location of the end-user. Thus, users are not always assigned to the best servers. To improve user assignment and as a consequence their performance we pro-pose and deploy a Provider-aided Distance Information Sys-tem (PaDIS). PaDIS is a novel system that allows ISPs to utilize its unique knowledge about the network conditions and user locations to better assign users to servers. Our field test results show that significant improvements in download time up to a factor of four for content offered by popular content distributors can be achieved when utilizing PaDIS