Provisioning overlay distribution networks

Future entertainment services are expected to be increasingly interactive, on demand and personalized. This paper aims to address the challenge of provisioning network and server resources to support the distribution of these services over the Internet. We propose the Overlay Distribution Network (ODN) as a cost-effective means to deliver these services. Because ODNs are created over shared network and server infrastructure, the provisioning problem becomes significantly complex. The paper formulates this problem as a joint resource provisioning and content replication optimization. The resulting formulation is proved to be NP-complete. We solved this problem with an efficient Lagrangian heuristic. Further, content clustering is employed to improve the heuristic run time. Initial results show that this is efficient. In some cases, clustering allows solutions with very similar quality to be achieved at a 20 times reduction in complexity. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.