Distributed algorithms for content allocation in interconnected content distribution networks

Abstract

Internet service providers increasingly deploy internal CDNs with the objective of reducing the traffic on their transit links and to improve their customers' quality of experience. Once ISP managed CDNs (nCDNs) become commonplace, ISPs would likely provide common interfaces to interconnect their nCDNs for mutual benefit, as they do with peering today. In this paper we consider the problem of using distributed algorithms for computing a content allocation for nCDNs. We show that if every ISP aims to minimize its cost and bilateral payments are not allowed then it may be impossible to compute a content allocation. For the case of bilateral payments we propose two distributed algorithms, the aggregate value compensation (AC) and the object value compensation (OC) algorithms, which differ in terms of the level of parallelism they allow and in terms of the amount of information exchanged between nCDNs. We prove that the algorithms converge, and we propose a scheme to ensure ex-post individual rationality. Simulations performed on a real AS-level network topology and synthetic topologies show that the algorithms have geometric rate of convergence, and scale well with the graphs' density and the nCDN capacity.