A Comparative Analysis of Content Delivery Network and Other Techniques for Web Content Delivery
Web content delivery is based on client-server model. In this model, all the web requests for specific contents are serviced by a single web server as the requested contents reside only on one server. Therefore, with the increasing reliance on the web, the load on the web servers is increasing, thus causing scalability, reliability and performance issues for the web service providers. Various techniques have been implemented to handle these issues and improve the Quality of Service of the web content delivery to end-users such as clustering of servers, client-side caching, proxy server caching, mirroring of servers, multihoming and Content Delivery Network (CDN). This paper gives an analytical and comparative look on these approaches. It also compares CDN with other distributed systems such as grid, cloud and peer-to-peer computing.