Cost-effective content delivery networks using clouds and nano data centers

Abstract

Videos-on-demand(VoD) services have already prevalent nowadays, because it is easier, cheaper, faster, and more comfortable way to watch movies at home. Also, the video quality has been increasing to satisfy the customers. The way that the video data is delivered to customers affects the total cost of the VoD service. Content delivery network(CDN) has been used as efficient content delivery, which consists of a number of replication servers around the world to minimize the latency, to avoid a single point of failure, and to distribute server load over the replicas. Recently, there has been some work on cloud-assisted VoD service that adopts a hybrid VoD delivery of centralized one and cloud CDN. This model can save the total cost for the VoD services significantly, compared to the centralized model. A novel concept called nano data center has been proposed, which is a network of gateways for internet services at home, which equipped with some storage. This nano data center can used for some large scale applications with much less energy, by exploiting the available resources of the home gateways that are on line almost all the time. In this paper, to further reduce the total cost for delivery video contents to VoD subscribers, we propose a hybrid delivery model adopting both of cloud CDN and nano data centers, called nano cloud CDN. We formulated the total cost for our proposed model, and we have simulated the model under various parameters and scenarios to prove the effectiveness. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.