Drafting behind Akamai (travelocity-based detouring)

To enhance web browsing experiences, content distribution networks (CDNs) move web content “closer” to clients by caching copies of web objects on thousands of servers worldwide. Additionally, to minimize client download times, such systems perform extensive network and server measurements, and use them to redirect clients to different servers over short time scales. In this paper, we explore techniques for inferring and exploiting network measurements performed by the largest CDN, Akamai; our objective is to locate and utilize quality Internet paths without performing extensive path probing or monitoring. Our contributions are threefold. First, we conduct a broad measurement study of Akamai’s CDN. We probe Akamai’s network from 140 PlanetLab vantage points for two months. We find that Akamai redirection times, while slightly higher than advertised, are sufficiently low to be useful for network control. Second, we empirically show that Akamai redirections overwhelmingly corr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Ao-Jan Su, David R. Choffnes, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, Fabián E. Bustamante
• Keywords: Akamai Redirection Times, Akamai Redirections, Akamai’s Network, SIGCOMM 2006