Performance Evaluation of Content Distribution Network Architectures through Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation

Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) has emerged as a new and powerful technology for the analysis of natural and artificial complex systems. In this paper ABMS is exploited for the modeling and performance evaluation of Conventional, Clustered and Cooperative Content Distribution Network (CDN) architectures. Clustered and Cooperative architectures differ from Conventional architectures as surrogate servers can loosely (in the Cooperative architectures) or tightly (in the Clustered architectures) cooperate to provide the requested contents to users. The results obtained from the simulation phase show that the Clustered architectures allow for significant improvements of the main CDN performance indices (average user perceived latency, cache hit ratio, and CDN utility) with respect to Conventional and Cooperative architectures.