A Review on Software Defined Content Delivery Network: A Novel Combination of CDN and SDN

Abstract

With the rapid growth of multimedia services, the burden of infrastructure is becoming heavier, which may not guarantee a high-quality experience for users. Whether the multimedia category is video on demand (VOD), live broadcast, or social media is a hot issue. Traditionally, content delivery network (CDN) service providers deploy servers as close to clients as possible to reduce latency. CDN is an overlay network mainly responsible for routing requests, distribution, delivery, and audit. As a supplement to computing and storage capacity, CDN service providers have begun migrating some of their services to the cloud to focus on the delivery process. At the same time, the collaboration between CDN service providers promotes scalability to meet the growing number of requests. However, the underlying physical layer needs to be improved. The cost of the traditional underlying network is very high and cannot be easily expanded. The concept of software definition network (SDN) is proposed to solve these problems. SDN functions are divided into control layer and data layer. In the SDN, the global view is achieved to receive information by centralization, and then the deployment is dynamically adjusted to control the network. In this paper, we summarize the advantage structure and problems of a newly developed system SDCDN (software defined content distributed network). We introduce similar research progress. Then we summarize the current situation of SDN and CDN, compare and analyze their advantages and disadvantages, and finally put forward the directions of open issues and the future research.