Content Distribution Networks Using Software Defined Networks

With exponential growth of the Internet traffic, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have started to look for alternatives to meet the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that have been promised to the customers. ISPs and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) when merged together can deliver the content much faster and efficient by making the best use of the resources and also reduces the traffic within the network. Implementing a CDN on a Software Defined Network (SDN) provides better control and granularity over the type of content that each server holds or distributes. A centralized approach on top decoupled control plane and data plane reduces overhead, better user experience and cost by using CDN. SDN also provides better user experiences, and a dramatic decrease in network systems and equipment costs. Following the advantages of SDN architecture, we propose the CDN-SDN architecture and discuss the logic behind SDN Server/Controller and its functions needed to achieve the SDN-based CDN approach.