Multi-Tenant Edge Virtual CDN Live Trials

A major challenge for telecommunications operators is to dimension and plan network capacity for all types of content delivered over the network, much of this being so-called “over-the-top” (OTT) traffic from third party content providers and aggregators. While Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are a very useful means of realising efficient delivery of large volumes of traffic, they can also be limited in flexibility and cost-efficiency due to the hardware-oriented nature of the architecture. Virtual CDNs (vCDNs) enable a more flexible and optimal delivery model whereby telco compute infrastructure offers a hosting environment for softwarised CDN caches. Such an approach also lends itself to increased levels of distribution and de-centralisation; edge compute to host vCDNs can provide both service quality advantages on the one hand, and network capacity planning benefits, on the other. This latter advantage arises from the opportunity for “local turn-around” of traffic due to cache hits on popular cached content. Only real-world trials of vCDN can determine these offload benefits in quantitative terms. This paper explains a major trial with two CDN partners (one delivering video content, the other delivering game content) performed in summer 2024 for a “metro” area; significant cache efficiency levels ranging from 50% to above 90% were observed confirming that significant traffic offload and thus capacity planning benefits - can be realised.