An efficient approach for content delivery in overlay networks

The replication of digital content in overlay networks makes the identification of the best server an interesting problem. In this paper, our aim is to reduce the content transfer time, which we define as the time required to download a digital content by a client using TCP. Our scheme consists of ranking the servers from the best one to the worst one based on a metric that corresponds to a prediction of the content transfer time from each server. Our prediction function considers the critical performance parameters that have an impact on the quality of the transfer, such as the load of the servers and the characteristics of the path between the client and the servers. Once the servers are ranked, the client can download the content on point-to-point from the best server, or in parallel from a subset of servers at the top of the list (best servers). Our experimental results show that our approach for identifying the best server(s) outperforms the existing classical solutions. Moreover, these results show that the proposed metric predicts the transfer time of a content with around 96% accuracy.