Technical Summary
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) provide numerous benefits: reduced
delivery cost for cacheable content, improved quality of experience
for End Users and increased robustness of delivery. For these
reasons they are frequently used for large-scale content delivery.
As a result, existing CDN Providers are scaling up their
infrastructure and many Network Service Providers (NSPs) are
deploying their own CDNs. It is generally desirable that a given
content item can be delivered to an End User regardless of that End
User's location or attachment network. This is the motivation for
interconnecting standalone CDNs so they can interoperate as an open
content delivery infrastructure for the end-to-end delivery of
content from Content Service Providers (CSPs) to End Users. However,
no standards or open specifications currently exist to facilitate
such CDN interconnection.
The goal of this document is to outline the problem area of CDN
interconnection for the IETF CDNI (CDN Interconnection) working
group.
Working Group Summary
There was strong consensus in the CDNI WG to publish this document
as its Problem Statement.
Document Quality
Despite many existing CDN implementations, there are no
implementations of CDN interconnection that resolve the functional
and operational challenges raised in this Problem Statement.
Personnel
Richard Woundy (richard_woundy@cable.comcast.com) is the Document Shepherd.
Martin Stiemerling is the Responsible Area Director.
RFC Editor Note
Please replace the first paragraph in Appendix A. "Design considerations for realizing the CDNI Interfaces" with this text
OLD
This section expands on how CDNI interfaces can reuse and leverage
existing protocols before describing each CDNI interface individually
and highlighting example candidate protocols that could be considered
for reuse or leveraging to implement the CDNI interfaces.
NEW
This section expands on how CDNI interfaces can reuse and leverage
existing protocols before describing each CDNI interface individually
and highlighting example candidate protocols that could be considered
for reuse or leveraging to implement the CDNI interfaces. However,
the options discussed here are purely examples and do not present
any consensus on protocols to be used later on.