Enhancing availability in content delivery networks for mobile platforms

Ensuring high data availability is a vital prerogative for Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and as we look to deploy CDN mechanisms onto mobile platforms, this imperative becomes ever more challenging. In traditional CDNs, replication ensures high availability of data, with server-loads and content-popularity often used as parameters to tightly control the process. However, the highly transient properties of such wireless and mobile devices constitute a major hurdle for any replication algorithm, rendering most simplified methods inadequate. Our contribution begins with a unique message-pulsing mechanism operating within a wireless cluster, that detects devices and ascertains their reliability. Results show the viability of our pulsing algorithm in determining a base replication level. Next, a Markovian queueing model is introduced, allowing us to induce replication based on the required speed of service. This affords finer control over the replication process, creating a more effective replication strategy suited for mobile-based CDNs. Extensive analysis of the model were performed, with parameters derived from real-world conditions. Results indicate that the model is able to compute logical values for the expected waiting times in service and thus, control the speed of replication within the CDN.