Efficient Large-scale Content Distribution with Combination of CDN and P2P Networks

With the growth of the Internet over the last decade, a key challenge for Internet infrastructure has been delivering increasingly large-scale content to a growing user population. CDN and P2P are two dominant technologies to improve distribution effectiveness. CDN may reduce the user-perceived latency, but it has shortage of expensive deployment. P2P can decrease the deployment cost, while it is of weakness to assure QoS when there are insufficient peers. In this paper, we present a hybrid content distribution network (HCDN) integrating complementary advantages of CDN and P2P, which is used to improve efficiency of largescale content distribution. To achieve in-depth understanding of HCDN’s effectiveness, we carry out a detailed performance evaluation based on deterministic fluid model. We also provide numeric results of HCDN, conventional CDN and pure P2P. Some performance metrics are taken into account in our analysis, such as the evolution of the number of seeds and downloaders, the service capacity of system and the average downloading time.