A two-level simulated annealing algorithm for efficient dissemination of electronic content

This paper describes a two–level simulated annealing heuristic for the joint problem of object placement and request routing in a Content Distribution Network (CDN) with constraints pertaining to server capacity and end–to–end object transfer delay. A CDN is a technology that is used to efficiently distribute electronic content throughout an existing network. The two–level solution procedure is composed of an outer and an inner simulated annealing algorithm. Computational experiments are conducted by comparing the proposed procedure with several truncated exact solution algorithms on randomly generated Internet topologies.