Adaptive Server and Path Switching Scheme for Content Delivery Network

Due to increases in the number of providers providing large-capacity content, multimedia products such as videos, images, and music now account for most of the traffic flowing over the Internet, and content delivery networks (CDNs) that can guarantee the load distribution and communication quality of related products on the Internet are in use around the world. However, with current CDN technologies, it is difficult to change the server or the path between a user and a server after a user has established a connection with a distribution server. Therefore, when dealing with long duration CDN communications, the conventional path control and distribution server selection methods related to CDNs cannot respond flexibly to changes in communication quality once communication has started. In response to this issue, this paper proposes a path and server switching scheme based on the estimated available throughput of each path as a way to improve CDN communication performance. Furthermore, via network simulations, we show that our proposed method can provide higher throughput performance than existing methods.