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Top1. Introduction
Content providers aim to seamlessly deliver their contents to their intended customers or end users and for this purpose, the Content Delivery Networks (CDN) have been (Wang et al., 2015). The traditional CDNs that are existing now can be too expensive for small to medium-sized content providers (Salahuddin et al., 2017). Also, creating a CDN for self and maintaining the storage and content delivery process by a content provider is an even more challenging and costly task that not many content providers can handle or afford. The maintenance of the servers and the storages within the CDN are cost expensive and suitable resources is required (Stocker et al., 2017). To make things easier for the content providers, cloud- based content placement storage and cloud-based content delivery mechanisms provide an alternate and much cheaper solution (Zhang et al., 2015). Cloud-based content delivery provides faster, cheaper and on-demand content delivery to the end users using the cloud computing concept (Ouf et al., 2015). For handling large amounts data such as a large number of web contents, cloud resources can be used that can handle big data easily (Bagui et al., 2015).
Cloud based Content Delivery Network (CCDN) has been a major research focus on recent times (Gkatzikis et al., 2017) and the focus is more on optimization of content placement with lesser resource usage and optimization of content delivery for less delivery cost (Xu et al., 2017). The metric that defines the resource usage in CCDN is the amount of storage consumed within the cloud. In case of content delivery cost, the metrics that define the latency cost and traffic cost are considered that are incurred in the cloud for delivering the contents to end users (Chu et al., 2016; Carlsson et al., 2014). By moving the content delivery process to the cloud environment (Mansouri et al., 2016), the content provider need not worry about optimization and maintenance of content placement and delivery. But the content provider still has to pay the cloud provider for the service that has been opted for. An efficient cloud provider with well optimized CCDN models will incur a lesser content delivery cost and resource usage and can achieve high performance content delivery. As a result, the cloud can provide cheaper CCDN services to the content provider (Mansouri et al., 2017), since the cost incurred by the cloud provider itself has been reduced. So, CCDN optimization is an essential task and is beneficial to both cloud providers and content providers (Liu et al., 2017).