15.8. Streaming Content Delivery

Just like forward proxies, CDN servers can also be used to scale up streaming content delivery. The initial idea is simple: clients are redirected to CDN servers that are used as broadcasting relays between the origin server[2] and the clients. Similar to forward proxies, a CDN server concentrates many client requests into a single stream from the origin server and hence reduces traffic and server load.

[2] Origin servers are often called source servers or stream sources in the context of streaming data. We continue to use the term origin server for uniformity.

Streaming content delivery poses especially interesting challenges in cases of delivering live streams, often referred to as Webcasts. The challenges stem ...

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