A content delivery infrastructure to support advanced services for business travellers

A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of network elements and procedures designed to efficiently connect information consumers with information providers, accelerating end-users access to contents and reducing network traffic and hardware requirements. The advent of nomadic users implies that CDNs should deal with routing and forwarding of requests for contents in a mobile environment too. The scenario we consider in this paper is that of the IST FIFTH project, where a local network on board a fast train is connected either via a satellite link or a Wireless-LAN access to the fixed content network. In this framework, we define a hierarchical structure of content servers for data management and delivery to business travellers on board trains. In addition, we propose a users' request routing approach to perform smart server selection, taking into account both network and server congestion.