Cost-Efficient Traffic Allocation in Content Delivery Networks: a Linear Programming Approach

Due to the surge in mobile apps, online videos, and cloud gaming, central servers struggle with high traffic demands. Content delivery networks (CDNs) mitigate this by distributing content from edge caches, easing backbone network strain. Yet, current allocation algorithms, constrained by practical complexities and billing, often fail to optimally schedule traffic, causing server overload and increased costs. Our solution, CEQC-CDN, addresses these issues by considering DNS load balancing, regional hijacking, quality constraints, and server capacity limits. By incorporating these factors as linear constraints through binary decomposition and variable introduction, CEQC-CDN achieves global optimal traffic scheduling. Employing a greedy policy for monthly optimization, tests demonstrate an 8.57% reduction in CDN traffic costs versus conventional greedy algorithms.