Intelligent Routing

1 Feature Intro

1.1 Brief Introduction

Intelligent Routing chooses the optimal path to the origin so that content is delivered to end users via the fastest and most reliable route. It is important because the Internet is a dynamic and ever-changing environment, subject to traffic congestion and temporary outages.
CDNetworks uses techniques to collect real-time data, and compares various paths to determine the best route between the origin and the CDN PoP. As a result, both cacheable and dynamic content are delivered more quickly and reliably to end users.

1.2 Applicable Product Lines

• Content Acceleration
• Dynamic Web Acceleration
• Media Acceleration
• Media Acceleration Live Broadcast

2 Feature Detail

Intelligent routing is the combination of the optimal route and route failover.

2.1 Optimal Route

Through the real-time internal detection among CDN PoPs, Intelligent Routing establishes a list of optimal access routes, and chooses the most effective data transmission route to transfer the request and response data for users.
As you can see from the image below, there are 3 available routes. And the time needed to travel from the CDN edge node to the origin via route A in blue, route B in green and route C in red is 200ms, 125ms and 100ms respectively. After comparing the 3 routes, route C with the shortest time will be selected.

2.2 Route Failover

To avoid the issue of temporary network outage, reduce the inaccessible rate of websites and optimize user experience, CDNetworks applies the technology of Route Failover, which detects the route in real time when a route becomes inaccessible, and another route will be used.

CDNetworks route failover technology contains 2 parts: dynamic route detection and zero-delay route failover.

• Dynamic Route Detection
  On the basis of real-time detection of availability, dynamic route detection obtains a list of available routes of that period of time. Following that, routings used to transfer user requests will be chosen from the available route list. Detecting requests are sent to the origin directly by CDNetworks PoPs, and the frequency of detecting request can be configured. In general, the detecting packets are very small in size and will not overload the origin.
• Zero-delay Route Failover
  As “dynamic route detection” is mainly to provide the list of available routes, zero-delay route failover is used to tackle routing failures that cannot be detected but occur suddenly when user sends requests. This technology is an advanced route failover method to guarantee a high level of stability.
  Based on the list of available routes obtained by dynamic route detection, the zero-delay route failover will switch to a backup route as soon as routing failures occur in the route requested by user. With the feature of zero-delay route failover, users will not be affected by routing failures, and the user experience will be improved significantly.

3 Key Benefits

With Intelligent Routing, customers will enjoy benefits as below:

1. Faster delivery speed: the delivery distance of the optimal route selected by intelligent routing is much shorter than that of the normal route.
2. Solve the issue of unstable access caused by network fluctuation or outage, lowering operating cost and improving website availability.