An Efficient Distributed Control Law for Load Balancing in Content Delivery Networks

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) aim at overcoming the inherent limitations of the Internet. The main concept at the basis of this technology is the delivery at edge points of the network, in proximity to the request areas, to improve the user’s perceived performance while limiting the costs. This paper focuses on the main research areas in the field of CDN, pointing out the motivations, and analyzing the existing strategies for replica placement and management, server measurement, best fit replica selection and request redirection. In this paper, we face the challenging issue of defining and implementing an effective law for load balancing in Content Delivery Networks .A formal study of a CDN system, carried out through the exploitation of a fluid flow model characterization of the network of servers. This result is then leveraged in order to devise a novel distributed and time-continuous algorithm for load balancing, which is also reformulated in a time-discrete version.