Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Traditional content delivery networks (CDNs) are provisioned in a static manner. This makes them less and less able to withstand the rapid and significant content growth (especially video) expected in the years to come. Furthermore their static provisioning is the main roadblock to elastic scalability, efficient resource usage, rapid introduction of new services, and lack of agility. However next generation CDNs powered by emerging technologies such as cloud computing and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), two complementary technologies can potentially meet these challenges. Cloud computing can enable efficient resource usage, elastic scalability, and rapid provisioning of new services. In this research project we propose to investigate and evaluate the performance of architectures and algorithms for next generation CDNs powered by cloud and NFV. Overall architectural and algorithmic requirements will be derived and used to review the state of the art. Novel architectures and algorithms will be proposed and evaluated. The first set of architectures and algorithms will focus on cloud based - next generation CDNs. The second set will deal with the NFV based architectures and algorithms which will complement the cloud based-architectures and algorithms to further enhance agility in next generation CDNs and related services provisioning.