A two-level simulated annealing algorithm for efficient dissemination of electronic content

Abstract

This paper describes a two-level simulated annealing heuristic for the joint problem of object placement and request routing in a Content Distribution Network (CDN) with constraints pertaining to server capacity and end-to-end object transfer delay. A CDN is a technology that is used to efficiently distribute electronic content throughout an existing network. The two-level solution procedure is composed of an outer and an inner simulated annealing algorithms. Computational experiments are conducted by comparing the proposed procedure with several truncated exact solution algorithms on randomly generated Internet topologies.

Keywords:

• telecommunications
• content distribution network
• object placement
• request routing
• simulated annealing

Acknowledgements

The first author is grateful to Dr Iradj Ouveysi for introducing him to the topic of content distribution, and to Vitória Pureza for helpful discussions on the simulated annealing algorithm. This research has been partially supported by a Strategic Project Grant of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC 2481). We gratefully acknowledge this support. We thank an anonymous referee who provided several valuable comments.