COMIC: Cost Optimization for Internet Content Multihoming

Content service is a type of Internet cloud service that provides end-users plentiful contents. To ensure high performance for content delivering, content service utilizes a technology known as content multihoming: contents are generated from multiple geographically distributed data centers and delivered by multiple distributed content distribution networks (CDNs). The electricity costs for data centers and the usage costs for CDNs are major contributors to the contents service cost. As electricity prices vary across data centers and usage costs vary across CDNs, scheduling data centers and CDNs has a tremendous consequence for optimizing content service cost. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Cost Optimization for Internet Content Multihoming (COMIC). COMIC dynamically balances end-users' loads among data centers and CDNs so as to minimize the content service cost. Using real-life electricity prices and CDN traces, the experiments demonstrate that COMIC effectively reduces the content service cost by more than 20 percent.