CDN-As-a-Service Provision Over a Telecom Operator’s Cloud

Abstract

Abstract-We present the design and implementation of a Content-Delivery-Network-as-a-Service (CDNaaS) architecture, which allows a telecom operator to open up its cloud infrastructure for content providers to deploy virtual CDN instances on demand, at regions where the operator has presence. Using northbound REST APIs, content providers can express performance requirements and demand specifications, which are translated to an appropriate service placement on the underlying cloud substrate. Our architecture is extensible, supporting various different CDN flavors, and, in turn, different schemes for cloud resource allocation and management. In order to decide on the latter in an optimal manner from an infrastructure cost and a service quality perspective, knowledge of the performance capabilities of the underlying technologies and compute resources is critical. Therefore, to gain insight which can be applied to the design of such mechanisms, but also with further implications on service pricing and SLA design, we carry out a measurement campaign to evaluate the capabilities of key enabling technologies for CDNaaS provision. In particular, we focus on virtualization and containerization technologies for implementing virtual CDN functions to deliver a generic HTTP service, as well as an HTTP video streaming one, empirically capturing the relationship between performance and service workload, both from a system operator and a user-centric viewpoint.Index Terms-Content delivery networks, experimental approaches, cloud computing, network functions virtualization, network planning and service deployment, quality of experience, virtualization.

CDN Slicing over a Multi-Domain Edge Cloud

“…Eventually, the time to serve a virtual CDN instantiation request critically depends on the size of the deployment in terms of VNF instances. As we have experimentally shown [42] (albeit on a different environment, service architecture, and implementation), this time is dominated by the time it takes to launch the VNF instances (which includes also the time to copy the VM images from the Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM)'s image store to the selected compute nodes); the delay due to the execution of API calls over the customer-facing northbound API or to communicate with the underlying VIMs on the southbound is negligible.…”

“…In order to decide on the optimal amount of compute resources to allocate to a slice given customer-defined demand and QoE specifications, we follow a measurement driven approach. In our prior work [42], considering specific technologies at the VIM and the CDN service levels, we carried out testbed experiments where we measured how QoE for a virtualized video service is affected by service workload. In this article, based on these experimental results, we derive an empirical model of QoE as a function of this workload, which we apply to (i) decide on an initial resource dimensioning, i.e., how many compute resources to dedicate to VNF instances composing a CDN slice, (ii) dynamically scale these resources in real time, so that the target QoE levels are attained, and (iii) be able to identify, based on data from real-time slice monitoring, what is the root cause in case of service quality degradation and act appropriately (i.e., identify whether QoE degradation is due to CPU load or reduced network capacity).…”

CPVNF: Cost-Efficient Proactive VNF Placement and Chaining for Value-Added Services in Content Delivery Networks

“…A few works have addressed the architectural solutions to the VNF placement problems in CDNs. Frangoudis et al [33] details the design and the implementation of an architecture that allows a telecommunication operator to lease its infrastructure to content providers for the deployment of surrogate servers as VNFs. The focus is on the northbound REST APIs used for the interactions between the content providers and the telecommunication operator.…”

Trustworthiness management in sharing CDN infrastructure

“…P. Frangoudis presented the design of a content-delivery-network-as-a-service architecture, which enables a telecom operator to open up its cloud infrastructure for content providers [6].…”