Media Companion: Delivering Content-oriented Web Services to Internet Media

TLDR: A prototype system called “Media Companion” which is built to evaluate the design principles is described in the paper, and the experimental results of deploying this system in the corporate network are also discussed.

Abstract: In the past few years we have seen a huge industrial investment on the development of content delivery networks (CDNs) which provide a large number of caches and storage devices at the edge of network to push content closer to the user for fast and reliable delivery. This development has triggered the beginning of a socalled “edge computing” where applications and computational resources are also moving to the edge for intelligent media services. To cope with the growing diversity and heterogeneity of the Internet, these edge servers offer a natural place to extend the capability of network intermediaries for content-oriented services such as automatic adaptation for small devices, personalization, location-aware data insertion and virus scanning. In this paper we present our investigation on using a network of edge servers for delivering content-oriented web services to Internet media. Similar to CDNs, our design goal is to make the content-oriented services part of the Internet infrastructure services accessible to content providers and content consumers via a subscription model. A prototype system called “Media Companion” which is built to evaluate our design principles is described in the paper, and the experimental results of deploying this system in our corporate network are also discussed.