Evolution and evaluation of Internet content delivery

Abstract

Internet content delivery has evolved from centralized hosting, Web replication to the recent content delivery network (CDN). Centralized hosting has the problems of high backbone bandwidth consumption and long user-perceived latency, while Web replication leads to high investment and operational costs in deploying servers in several ISP networks. However, a content delivery network acts as a third party to deliver for various content providers into many ISPs. In this paper, we Introduce the evolution of Internet content delivery and evaluate the performance of CDN. In our evaluation, we find that CDN is more cost-effective than Web replication, saves more bandwidth consumption and distribution time than traditional distribution alternatives such as FTP, has shorter user-perceived latency than centralized hosting, and Improves delivery quality of streaming media.