CDNs Content Outsourcing via Generalized Communities

Content distribution networks (CDNs) balance costs and quality in services related to content delivery. Devising an efficientcontent outsourcing policy is crucial since, based on such policies, CDN providers can provide client-tailored content, improveperformance, and result in significant economical gains. Earlier content outsourcing approaches may often prove ineffective since theydrive prefetching decisions by assuming knowledge of content popularity statistics, which are not always available and are extremelyvolatile. This work addresses this issue, by proposing a novel self-adaptive technique under a CDN framework on which outsourcedcontent is identified with no a priori knowledge of (earlier) request statistics. This is employed by using a structure-based approachidentifying coherent clusters of “correlated” Web server content objects, the so-called Web page communities. These communities arethe core outsourcing unit, and in this paper, a detailed simulation experimentation has shown that the proposed technique is robust andeffective in reducing user-perceived latency as compared with competing approaches, i.e., two communities-based approaches, Webcaching, and non-CDN.