Abstract

Abstract. As more aspects of our work and life move online and the Internet expands beyond a communication medium to become a plat-form for business and society, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have recently gained momentum in the Internet computing landscape. Today, a large portion of Internet traffic is originating from CDNs. The ultimate success of CDNs requires novel policies that would address the increas-ing demand for content. Here we exploit the CDN utility- a metric that captures the traffic activity in a CDN, expressing the usefulness of surro-gate servers in terms of data circulation in the network. We address the content replication problem by replicating content across a geographi-cally distributed set of servers and redirect users to the closest server in terms of CDN utility. Through a detailed simulation environment, using real and synthetically generated data sets we show that the proposed approach can improve significantly the performance of Internet-based content delivery.