Effective peering for multi-provider content delivery services

Abstract

Peering allows service providers to handle traffic surges without over-provisioning, reduce the cost of dedicated infrastructure, and leverage the specialization and prices of partner providers. In this paper, we develop a peering system for multi-provider content delivery based on a cost-optimized peer selection algorithm. We formulate a cost model for evaluating competing peering strategies, and use measurement data collected from globally distributed network probe stations, large-scale Web sites, and existing service provider infrastructures to empirically evaluate proposed peering strategies. Our analysis shows that our peer selection algorithm is significantly more efficient than greedy alternatives, in terms of minimizing service cost and respecting network delay and server capacity thresholds, over a broad range of real-world scenarios.