Content Delivery Peering

With the emergence of the Web, the leading use of the Internet has become content delivery. Measurements indicate sixty to eighty percent of Internet traffic is Web content, and the ancillary traffic to locate and determine how to deliver it. As a result, many content publishing, hosting, distribution and delivery service providers are building out globally distributed networks of servers. Others are looking for ways to extend their reach and scale without expansive physical deployments.

We are investigating ways to internetwork, or peer, content-oriented service providers to create a virtual, application-layer overlay to the Internet. We are working within the IETF to standardize the interfaces amongst these content networks. We are also developing algorithms to enable content and services to migrate, potentially via replication to one or more network locations, with the goal of optimizing service delivery. Our work focuses on detecting when and where content and services should be offloaded to, or accepted from, partner providers; effectively directing clients to service locations; and adapting the system to service delivery feedback.