The rapid increase of content delivery over the Internet has led to the proliferation of content distribution networks (CDNs). CDNs might consist of both managed infrastructure as well as peer-to-peer (P2P) elements. Our main focus in this talk is on CDN management algorithms for request routing, content placement, and eviction. We abstract the system of frontend source nodes and backend caches of the CDN in the likeness of the input and output nodes of a switch. In this model, queues of requests for different pieces of content build up at the source nodes, which route these requests to a cache that contains the requested content. For each request that is routed to a cache, a corresponding data file is transmitted back to the requesting source across links of finite capacity. Caches are of finite size, and the content of the caches can be refreshed periodically. Can we design distributed policies for joint request routing, content placement and content eviction with the goal of small user latencies? At the end of the talk we will discuss a general question of mechanism design motivated by content distribution, as well as some of our other recent results.

Srinivas Shakkottai received the M.S. (2003) and PhD (2007) degrees, both in electrical engineering, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a post-doctoral associate at Stanford University in 2007, and has been an assistant professor at the Dept. of ECE at Texas A&M University since Spring 2008. His research interests include content distribution systems, wireless ad-hoc networks, Internet economics and game theory, congestion control, and the measurement and analysis of Internet data.

Srinivas is the recipient of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Young Investigator Award (US Dept. of Defense, 2009), as well as research awards from Cisco (2008) and Google (2010). He earlier received the International Programs in Engineering Fellowship (University of Illinois, 2005), and the National Science Fellowship (KVPY, Dept. of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, 1999-2001).