Federating Distributed, Heterogeneous Content Distribution Actors

International audienceThe federation of heterogeneous CDN and Cloud actors will present a main aspect of evolution of content distribution services. Indeed, as the constraints in terms of coverage and capacity (storage/ streaming/ bandwidth) of major OTTs increase, small CDN actors are tending to federate in order to overcome their individual lack of capacity/coverage and to define new business models which are attractive to all of them. We position our contribution in this particular context.Given a large set of CDN actors with a limited footprint and/or capacity and a set of Content Providers (CPs) with different requirements over a global footprint, our goal is to statically build, on top of the heterogeneous platforms, a federated CDN system that is able to fulfill all SLAs and to define, for the so-formed system, the content distribution and requests redirection policies that allow the most cost-efficient use of global resources. The decision-making process is achieved, in a centralized manner, by a third-party broker and is subject to capacity and fairness constraints with regard to individual actors. In other terms, each participant to the federation should find an economic interest in doing so with respect to a scenario where he operates individually.Putting in place our proposal requires a standardization effort in terms of introducing a new “broker-based” architecture for CDN interconnection and defining, in the context of this new architecture, the information to be exchanged between the CDN actors and the broker both prior to decision making and in real time for better tuning resources allocation and redirection policies