Cost-Effective Configuration of Content Resiliency Services Under Correlated Failures

Value-added content resiliency services help to migrate the burden of resiliency provisioning and maintenance from service users, especially home users and small/medium organizations, who have difficulty in handling correlated failures that impact large areas. For service providers to achieve business success, however, the cost-effectiveness of their resiliency strategies is critical: while the content resiliency requirements specified by the end users have to be satisfied, excessive preventive operation costs caused by the over-reaction to potential risks should be avoided. In this paper, we study the problem of cost-effective configuration in content resiliency service networks under both independent and geographically correlated failures. We propose a new approach to modeling correlated failures in a representable, quantifiable and consistent way, which allows for both quantified availability guarantees and aggressive prevention cost optimization. We then formulate the cost-effective configuration problem in content resiliency services and develop both real optimal and heuristic-based algorithms for solving the problem. Our experiments show that with the help of good models for correlated failures, the operation cost of the services can be significantly reduced without impairing the user-specified content resiliency