On Private CDNs with Off-Sourced Network Infrastructures: a Model and a Case Study

The delivery of multimedia contents through a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is typically handled by a specific third party, separated from the content provider. However, in some specific cases, the content provider may be interested in carrying out this function using a private CDN, possibly using a off-sourced network infrastructure. The differences between this scenario and the typical content delivery one can be summarized as follows. First, we have a different workload as the content consumer are typically part of the same organization that is the content provider. Second, the off-sourced nature of the network infrastructure has a major impact on the available choices for CDN design. In this paper we discuss the optimization model for the design of such CDN infrastructure and we validate the results through a real case study.