MCDN: Multimedia Content Discovery and Delivery

This paper presents a new architecture for content delivery networks (CDN). Whereas current CDN architectures represent proprietary overlay structures, our new architecture is based on open interfaces to allow an arbitrary composition of CDN services and actors supporting a variety of business models. The provision of content access, even in an optimized way, is not sufficient to satisfy future requirements, which will be driven by the heterogeneity of the technical environment and the expectation of the end user to have access to personalized content everywhere. Providers want to introduce new services and to rapidly change the access to their services in a secure way. The presented architecture is based on these requirements. It has been developed and successfully implemented in the EU project mCDN (multimedia content discovery and delivery) that has been finalized early 2006