Content delivery networks

Abstract

Since bottlenecks and congestion often happen with the phenomenal growth in the use of the network, the demand for improving network delivered performance is very necessary. Deploying Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) technology to improve delivery performance has caused more and more people's attention. Content Delivery Networks employ many geographically distributed sites to improve the scalability and improves network performance by reducing the client's response time. In this thesis, we initially present the background knowledge on CDNs, which includes CDNs concept, function, methodology, components and market analysis. The thesis emphasizes analyzing, comparing and evaluating various aspects of CDNs. We divide the whole comparison and evaluation into three parts. Firstly, we analyze and compare CDNs to other methods for improving performance and congestion control. Secondly, we overview different technologies that can be used within CDNs, then compare and analyze various CDNs components and implementations. Thirdly, we select current representative CDNs companies or providers to compare and evaluate their products and services. In this thesis, we also describe some main applications of CDNs and do a case study of Cisco ECDN and Volera Velocity CDN for E-learning. Finally, we conclude this thesis by summarizing our analysis and giving recommended trends for CDNs development.