Looking for in-depth information on content delivery networks? RCR Wireless News looked at some of the available research and reports on CDNs, and selected these CDN PDFs as those most worth your time to read. They cover a broad range of topics from basic information on CDN function, to market trends, to individual CDN companies’ perspectives
1. A Taxonomy and Survey of Content Delivery Networks, by Al-Mukaddim Khan Pathan and Rajkumar Buyya. Coming out of the Grid Computing and Distributed Systems Lab at the University of Melbourne, this paper gives a look at the composition, content distribution and management, request-routing and performance measurement of CDNs. The lab also has a CDN tutorial that focuses on Akamai’s CDN. While some of this research is older, it still gives some solid basics.
2. Content delivery networks: Market dynamics and growth perspectives from Informa Telecoms. Including predictions and insights on the market through 2017, this white paper looks at some of the market consolidation in CDNs in recent years, as well as the role of CDNs for telco operators, smaller over-the-top players, and the relationship between CDNs, the cloud and carrier Ethernet.
3. The Akamai Network: A Platform for High-Performance Internet Applications by Erik Nygren, Ramesh K. Sitaraman and  Jennifer Sun. A collaboration between Akamai and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, this is a scholarly look at Akamai’s reach, technologies and architectural approaches. It also covers some of the most common content delivery challenges over the Internet that CDNs are designed to address, including peering point congestion, inefficient routing protocols, unreliable networks, inefficient communications protocols and application limitations. (For a slightly different, more recent take on the topic from Akamai, its technical paper on overlay networks is also an interesting read.)
4. Pushing CDN/ISP Collaboration to the Limit. A technical paper published jointly by academic experts, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs and Akamai, this paper talks about the relationship between Internet service providers and content delivery networks. It focuses on two central enablers for supporting “collaboration and improving content delivery performance: informed end-user to server assignment and in-network server allocation.”
5. Origin Storage: The Next Level of Delivery Optimization. This white paper from CDN provider Limelight Networks discusses the role of latency and the cloud in content storage and delivery.
6. Comparing CDN Performance: Amazon Cloudfront’s Last Mile Testing Results from Frost & Sullivan. This white paper includes case studies from a couple Amazon.com Cloudfront customers. Although it’s particularly favorable in its view of Amazon Cloudfront, there is some worthwhile information in describing testing for CDNs as well as benchmarking methodology and figures for several of the major CDN networks.
7. Just-in-Time Packaging vs. CDN Storage, Yuval Fisher, RGB Networks. A technical paper that discusses options for video-on-demand delivery to multiple devices via HTTP streaming, and examines the possibility of just-in-time packaging compared to CDN storage in multiple formats.
8. Unreeling Netflix: Understanding and Improving Multi-CDN Movie Delivery, by Vijay Kumar Adhikari, et al. With Netflix accounting for as much as 30% of U.S. broadband traffic at peak times, its delivery methods have a huge impact on both wired and wireless networks. This research paper examines Netflix’s content delivery methods.
9. Application Of Policy-Based Indexes And Unified Caching For Content Delivery, by Andrey Kisel, Alcatel-Lucent. This technical paper delves into issues of policy and caching for OTT content, primarily addressing concerns of MSOs and topics including traffic mirroring and cache avoidance.
Image: 123RF
