Assessing Affinity Between Users and CDN Sites

Fan, Xun and Katz-Bassett, Ethan and Heidemann, John
USC/Information Sciences Institute

citation

Xun Fan, Ethan Katz-Bassett and John Heidemann 2015. Assessing Affinity Between Users and CDN Sites. Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis (Barcelona, Spain, Apr. 2015). [DOI] [PDF] [Dataset]

abstract

Large web services employ CDNs to improve user performance. CDNs improve performance by serving users from nearby Front-End (FE) Clusters. They also spread users across Front-End Clusters when one is overloaded or unavailable and others have unused capacity. Our paper is the first to study the dynamics of the user-to-Front-End Cluster mapping for Google and Akamai from a large range of client prefixes. We measure how 32,000 prefixes associate with Front-End Clusters in their CDNs every 15 minutes for more than a month. We study geographic and latency effects of mapping changes, showing that 50–70% of prefixes switch between Front-End Clusters that are very distant from each other (more than 1,000 km), and that these shifts sometimes (28–40% of the time) result in large latency shifts (100 ms or more). Most prefixes see large latencies only briefly, but a few (2–5%) see high latency much of the time. We also find that many prefixes are directed to several countries over the course of a month, complicating questions of jurisdiction.

reference

@inproceedings{Fan15a,
  author = {Fan, Xun and Katz-Bassett, Ethan and Heidemann, John},
  title = {Assessing Affinity Between Users and {CDN} Sites},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis},
  year = {2015},
  sortdate = {2015-04-17},
  project = {ant, retrofuture, lacrend},
  jsubject = {traffic_detection},
  month = apr,
  address = {Barcelona, Spain},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {CDN, google, akamai, affinity},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Fan15a.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Fan15a.pdf},
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute},
  copyrightholder = {IEEE},
  copyrightterms = {
  	Personal use of this material is permitted.  Permission from IEEE must
  	be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media,
  	including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or
  	promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or
  	redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted
  	component of this work in other works.
    },
  blogurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/blog/?p=645},
  dataseturl = {https://ant.isi.edu/datasets/mapping_cdns/},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-17172-2_7}
}

copyright

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.