Why is CDN technology essential to building the foundation of the metaverse?

The speed and convenience brought by the Internet have already had an impact on all aspects of people's lives. You can go shopping without leaving your home, and you can meet people via video even if they are thousands of miles away... In recent years, with the popularization of mobile Internet and the rise of mobile applications such as video and live broadcast, the scale of Internet users has been increasing day by day.

According to the "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet", as of December 2021, the scale of Internet users in my country reached 1.032 billion, with 42.96 million new Internet users compared to December 2020, and the Internet penetration rate reached 73.0%, an increase of 2.6 percentage points from December 2020.

The user experience pressure brought by the huge user base has also made the Internet face unprecedented challenges. Especially in the current era of rapid development of the Metaverse, the importance of ensuring Internet access experience has become more prominent. Therefore, CDN technology, as the underlying foundation of the network, has become a key factor in ensuring a smooth experience of the new interactive form of the Metaverse.

What is a CDN?

The importance of CDN technology to the Internet access experience is unquestionable, so why is CDN technology essential to building the foundation of the Metaverse? First, we need to know what CDN is.

The full name of CDN is Content Delivery Network, which refers to a traffic distribution management network platform composed of node server groups distributed in different regions to provide users with decentralized storage and high-speed caching of content.

The principle is to deploy cache servers in areas or networks where user access is relatively concentrated. When users visit a website, global load technology is used to direct the user's access to the nearest cache server, which then provides content services to the user, thereby resolving network congestion and improving the response speed of user access.

Let's take a more understandable example: there is a small river in a certain place, and there are two villages beside the river. The village closer to the river is Village A, and the village farther away is Village B. In order to solve the problem of the long distance to the river to fetch water, Village B built a reservoir next to Village B and diverted water from the river. In this way, each time it only needs to fetch water from the reservoir, which effectively shortens the distance to fetch water.

In this example, the river is equivalent to the origin server of the website, villages A and B are equivalent to terminals in different locations, and the reservoir is equivalent to the CDN node. With the addition of the reservoir (CDN node), village B (a terminal far away) can also obtain water (website resources) from the river (origin server) by taking the same short distance (network transmission distance).

Core technologies of CDN

So how does CDN optimize the “water intake path”? What key technologies does it rely on to achieve this?

1. Load balancing technology

Load balancing technology is the core of CDN to achieve network acceleration, which includes network load balancing and server load balancing. Network load balancing is to distribute the traffic on the network as evenly as possible to several servers or network nodes that can complete the same task, so as to improve the overall performance of the network and avoid overloading of some servers or network nodes.

Server load balancing means that tasks can be distributed among servers with different performances, which can ensure that servers with poor performance do not become system bottlenecks and that the resources of servers with high performance are fully utilized. By using multi-site content and services, not only can fault tolerance and availability be improved, but also failures caused by accidents such as network interruptions can be prevented.

At present, server load balancing plays an important role in CDN technology, and its performance is directly related to the performance of the entire CDN.

2. Content distribution technology

The response speed of a website depends not only on the network's bandwidth, routing, and server, but also on the distance between the access terminal and the server. Long-distance network communications will inevitably increase network latency.

By using content distribution to distribute website content to CDN nodes, latency can be effectively reduced. Content distribution is divided into two types: PUSH and PULL. PUSH is active distribution, usually distributed from the source to each CDN node by the content management system. PULL is passive distribution, usually driven by user requests.

In actual application, CDN generally supports both PUSH and PULL distribution methods. However, the content distribution method may vary depending on the content type and business model. Generally, PUSH distribution method is suitable for situations where content access is relatively concentrated, such as hot movie and TV streaming content, while PULL distribution method is more suitable for situations where content access is dispersed.

3. Caching Technology

In CDN, another technology to improve network access speed is caching technology, such as proxy caching service, transparent proxy caching service, transparent proxy caching service using redirection service, etc. Through web caching service, users can minimize the traffic of WAN when accessing web pages. And users can store content in their ISP's cache, which will further improve access speed.

What other advantages does CDN have?

In addition to effectively improving website access speed, CDN also has many of the following features:

1. Optimize bandwidth usage: Users can obtain data from nodes, reducing the bandwidth usage requirements of remote backbone networks.
2. Reduce the pressure on the source server: Users obtain content from different cache servers, which effectively reduces the traffic load pressure on the source server.
3. Cross-operator acceleration: Utilize cache servers on different lines to achieve cross-operator network acceleration.
4. Improved security: When accessing the cache server, the real IP address of the source server is hidden, reducing the risk of being attacked.

Based on the characteristics and advantages described above, in the current situation of the rise of streaming media such as video and live broadcast, facing the dual pressure of traffic and user experience, CDN technology is not only an effective means to improve the quality of network access, but also a good medicine for enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency. For the Metaverse, although the six major characteristics of the Metaverse all require the foundation of the network, the real-time guarantee cannot be separated from CDN technology. Therefore, CDN technology is indispensable in building the foundation of the Metaverse.