NETCAP: a capacity planning tool for practical content distribution network designs

This paper describes a capacity planning tool NETCAP, which is a prototype software program for automatically planning and integrating application‐specific content‐distribution networks (CDNs). The CDN integration problem consists of two problems: data management system design problem and network topology design problem. The data management system design problem comprises of the server placement and file allocation problems, where the network topology design problem involves determining the network topology with network technology considerations. The CDN integration problem has been formulated as an optimization problem; where the objective function is to optimize a network topology that satisfies both the servers' access requirements and clients' communications. An evolutionary technique is used in NETCAP to search the design space. The experimental results for a CDN integration problem described here demonstrate the effectiveness of NETCAP in finding good CDN designs from a large design space in a few minutes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.