Content-aware traffic engineering

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Abstract
Recent studies show that a large fraction of Internet traffic is originated by Content Providers (CPs) such as content distribution networks and hyper-giants. To cope with the increasing demand for content, CPs deploy massively distributed server infrastructures. Thus, content is available in many network locations and can be downloaded by traversing different paths in a network. Despite the prominent server location and path diversity, the decisions on how to map users to servers by CPs and how to perform traffic engineering by ISPs, are independent. This leads to a lose-lose situation as CPs are not aware about the network bottlenecks nor the location of end-users, and the ISPs struggle to cope with rapid traffic shifts caused by the dynamic CP server selection process. In this paper we propose and evaluate Content-aware Traffic Engineering (CaTE), which dynamically adapts the traffic demand for content hosted on CPs by utilizing ISP network information and end-user location during the server selection process. This leads to a win-win situation because CPs are able to enhance their end-user to server mapping and ISPs gain the ability to partially influence the traffic demands in their networks. Indeed, our results using traces from a Tier-1 ISP show that a number of network metrics can be improved when utilizing CaTE.