Network performance monitoring in a content delivery service

• US 7,716,367 B1
• Filed: 02/18/2004
• Issued: 05/11/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 07/20/2000
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Akamai Technologies, Inc.
• Original Assignee: Akamai Technologies, Inc.
• Inventors: Parker, Andrew, Kleinberg, Robert, Levine, Matthew, Soviani, Adrian, Dhanldina, Rizwan S., Sundaram, Ravi, Leighton, F. Thomson, Lewin, Daniel M.
• Primary Examiner(s): Nguyen; Thu
• Assistant Examiner(s): Dailey; Thomas J
• Application Number:
  US10/779,691
• Time in Patent Office: 2,274 Days
• Field of Search: 709/226, 709/238, 709/244, 709/245
• US Class Current: 709/244
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 2101/30 Types of network names
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 2101/69 using geographic information, e.g. room number
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5058 Service discovery by the service manager
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/509 wherein the managed service relates to media content delivery, e.g. audio, video or TV
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/0876 Network utilisation, e.g. volume of load or congestion level
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 61/4511 using domain name system [DNS]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1001 for accessing one among a plurality of replicated servers
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/289 Intermediate processing functionally located close to the data consumer application, e.g. in same machine, in same home or in same sub-network
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/52 specially adapted for the location of the user terminal
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/02 Services making use of location information

Abstract

A network architecture or framework that supports hosting and content distribution on a truly global scale allows a Content Provider to replicate and serve its most popular content at an unlimited number of points throughout the world. The inventive framework comprises a set of servers operating in a distributed manner. The actual content to be served is preferably supported on a set of hosting servers (sometimes referred to as ghost servers). This content comprises HTML page objects that, conventionally, are served from a Content Provider site. A base HTML document portion of a Web page is served from the Content Provider'"'"'s site while one or more embedded objects for the page are served from the hosting servers, preferably, those hosting servers near the client machine. By serving the base HTML document from the Content Provider'"'"'s site, the Content Provider maintains control over the content.

Claims

1. A method for Internet content delivery, comprising:

establishing a content delivery network at network locations, the content delivery network comprising a plurality of content servers for serving content resources, wherein the plurality of content servers includes a plurality of subsets of content servers, each subset located at one of a plurality of Internet data centers;

for each Internet Protocol (IP) address block from which requests for content resources are expected to be received, generating a candidate list of Internet data centers to be used to service the requests for content resources, wherein the candidate list of Internet data centers is generated using (i) geographic information from one or more Internet registry databases identifying a geographic location of the IP address block, (ii) BGP route information collected from BGP peers participating in BGP (BGP) sessions, (iii) autonomous system (AS) information, and (iv) data collected from one or more network performance metric tests; and

;

for the IP address block, selecting at least one of the Internet data centers from the candidate list to be used to service the requests for content resources, wherein the selected Internet data center is written into a network map, and wherein the selecting step is carried out concurrently for each IP address block from which requests for content resources are expected to be received such that the network map comprises the selected Internet data center for each IP address block;

providing the network map to a domain name service (DNS) associated with the content delivery network; and

in response to a DNS query received at the domain name service associated with the content delivery network, using the network map to identify one of the Internet data centers from the candidate list to be used to service a request for a content resource.

2. The method for Internet content delivery as described in claim 1 wherein the selecting step is performed by executing an algorithm.

3. The method for Internet content delivery as described in claim 2 wherein the algorithm is a multi-commodity bipartite, min-cost flow algorithm.

4. The method for Internet content delivery as described in claim 3 wherein the flow algorithm uses a graph that includes a first set of nodes, and a second set of nodes, wherein a node of the first set of nodes represents an IP address block and a node of the second set of nodes represents a single link at an Internet data center on the list of candidate data centers.

5. The method for Internet content delivery as described in claim 4 wherein a node of the first set of nodes is connected to a node of the second set of nodes by a link that has a communication cost associated therewith.

6. The method for Internet content delivery as described in claim 1 wherein the BGP sessions include internal BGP (iBGP) sessions.

7. The method for Internet content delivery as described in claim 1 wherein the content resources include a web resource.

8. The method for Internet content delivery as described in claim 1 wherein the selected Internet data center is nearby the IP address block.