A Distributed Control Law for Load Balancing in Content Delivery Networks

Abstract

Large Internet-scale distributed systems deploy hundreds of thousands of servers in thousands of data centers around the world. Internet-scale distributed system to have emerged in the past decade is the content delivery network (CDN, for short) that delivers web content, web and IP-based applications, downloads, and streaming media to end-users (i.e., clients) around the world. 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, I 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.