As current traffic growth is expected to strain capacity of today¿s metro network, novel content distribution architectures where contents are placed closer to the users are being investigated. In that regard, telecom operators can deploy datacenters (DCs) in metro areas, thus reducing the impact of the traffic between users and DCs. In this paper, a hierarchical content distribution architecture for the telecom cloud is investigated: core DCs placed in geographically distributed locations, are interconnected through permanent “per content provider” (CP) virtual network topologies (CP-VNT); additionally, metro DCs need to be interconnected with the core DCs. CP¿s data is replicated in the core DCs through the CP-VNTs, while metro-to-core (M2C) anycast connections are established periodically for content synchronization. Since network failures might disconnect the CP-VNTs, recovery mechanisms are proposed to reconnect both topologies and anycast connections. Topology creation, anycast provisioning, and recovery problems are first formally stated and modeled as Integer Linear Programs (ILP) and heuristic algorithms are proposed. Exhaustive simulation results show significant improvements in both supported traffic and restorability. Workflows to implement the algorithms within the Applications-based Network Operations (ABNO) architecture and extensions for PCEP are proposed. Finally, the architecture is experimentally validated in UPC's SYNERGY test-bed running our ABNO-based iONE architecture.

Peer Reviewed