Runtime relocation of CDN Serving Points - Enabler for low costs mobile Content Delivery

The recent proliferation of powerful smartphones have enabled an explosive increase in demand for mobile video (and other content) download services. In order to meet the users´ demand and quality expectation, the mobile network operators tend to deploy and operate their own Content Delivery Network (CDN) within their existing network infrastructure. This situation has given rise to new set of research and standardization challenges to address this latest trend of expanding role/scope of network infrastructures and resource demands. New methods and strategies need to be devised for resource-efficient and costeffective delivery of such high volume content to mobile users. In this paper we motivate the enabling of runtime relocation of mobility gateways and CDN Serving Points for maintaining low costs for mobile content delivery. By means of a detailed simulative study, we evaluate the cost of delivering content to mobile users while taking into consideration different topologies, user mobility and content size. We demonstrate that the gain that is achieved in terms of cost saving justify taking additional protocol complexity to support runtime relocation of Mobile CDN serving points.