Caching and optimized request routing in cloud-based content delivery systems

Geographically distributed cloud platforms enable an attractive approach to large-scale content delivery. Storage at various sites can be dynamically acquired from (and released back to) the cloud provider so as to support content caching, according to the current demands for the content from the different geographic regions.When storage is sufficiently expensive that not all content should be cached at all sites, two issues must be addressed: how should requests for content be routed to the cloud provider sites, and what policy should be used for caching content using the elastic storage resources obtained from the cloud provider. Existing approaches are typically designed for non-elastic storage and little is known about the optimal policies when minimizing the delivery costs for distributed elastic storage. In this paper, we propose an approach in which elastic storage resources are exploited using a simple dynamic caching policy, while request routing is updated periodically according to the solution of an optimization model. Use of pull-based dynamic caching, rather than push-based placement, provides robustness to unpredicted changes in request rates. We show that this robustness is provided at low cost. Even with fixed request rates, use of the dynamic caching policy typically yields content delivery cost within 10% of that with the optimal static placement. We compare request routing according to our optimization model to simpler baseline routing policies, and find that the baseline policies can yield greatly increased delivery cost relative to optimized routing. Finally, we present a lower-cost approximate solution algorithm for our routing optimization problem that yields content delivery cost within 2.5% of the optimal solution. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.