Title: A content delivery infrastructure to support advanced services for business travellers

Authors: Nicola Blefari-Melazzi, Dario Di Sorte, Mauro Femminella

Addresses: Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica, University of Rome ''Tor Vergata'', Via del Politecnico 1, Rome 00133, Italy ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica e dell'Informazione, University of Perugia, Via G. Duranti 93, Perugia 06125, Italy. ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica e dell'Informazione, University of Perugia, Via G. Duranti 93, Perugia 06125, Italy

Abstract: A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of network elements and procedures designed to efficiently connect information consumers with information providers, accelerating end-users access to contents and reducing network traffic and hardware requirements. The advent of nomadic users implies that CDNs should deal with routing and forwarding of requests for contents in a mobile environment too. The scenario we consider in this paper is that of the IST FIFTH project, where a local network on board a fast train is connected either via a satellite link or a Wireless-LAN access to the fixed content network. In this framework, we define a hierarchical structure of content servers for data management and delivery to business travellers on board trains. In addition, we propose a users| request routing approach to perform smart server selection, taking into account both network and server congestion.

Keywords: mobile customers; content delivery networks; caching; server selection; multi-protocol label switching; business travellers; e-business; electronic business; mobile communications; data management; data delivery; request routing; network congestion; server congestion; mobile computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEB.2005.007272

International Journal of Electronic Business, 2005 Vol.3 No.3/4, pp.276 - 287

Published online: 30 Jun 2005 *

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