The impact of brokers on the future of content delivery

Abstract

Various trends are reshaping content delivery on the Internet: the explosive growth of traffic due to video, users' increasing expectations for higher quality of experience (QoE), and the proliferation of server capacity from a variety of sources (e.g., cloud computing services, content provider-owned datacenters, CDNs, and ISP-owned CDNs). In order to meet the scale and quality demands imposed by users, content providers have started to spread demand across multiple CDNs using a broker. Brokers break many traditional CDN assumptions (e.g., unexpected traffic skew and significant variance in demand over short timescales). Through an analysis of data from a leading broker and a leading CDN, we show the potential challenges and opportunities that brokers impart on content delivery. We take the first steps towards improvement through a redesigned broker-CDN interface.