What is CDN? Learn All About Content Delivery Network

We have spoken at length about both the challenges and benefits of the surge in the use of mobile devices to access the internet, and with good reason given the way in which consumers are overwhelmingly turning away from traditional PCs to mobile devices as they view the web make they purchases. This is putting a real strain on global networks as they try and deal with data and mobile delivery.

Now Samsung, whose popular line of mobile devices have sold millions around the world, making them the most popular mobile device manufacturer, is weighing into the mobile acceleration arena. Working with Akamai, one of the world’s leading content delivery network providers, Samsung is developing advanced content delivery technologies specifically for use on mobile networks – not surprising giving the importance of mobile devices to the company’s success.

The technology was demonstrated at last months Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and it aimed to highly how mobile content delivery networks can result in improved page load times on mobile devices, even in heavily congested mobile environments. The key to their technology is the use of mobile traffic prioritisation in conjunction with their mobile caching solution, known as Smart Cache.

Akamai’s contribution to the project is via their web acceleration and mobile traffic prioritisation technologies. This instructs mobile networks to prioritise premium content across the network, allowing less heavy data to be delivered last and ensuring large files are sent swiftly on these traditionally low latency networks.

Samsung’s name for the combined technology is Smart Media Networks, and the integration of their Smart Cache system is integral to its success. It aims to provide a better end user experience by increasing download speeds and reducing total traffic across the backhaul network. It does this by locating cache servers at mobile base stations, which are the closest network edges from end users, allowing customers faster access to multimedia and other types of data. This allows high performance downloads, even in dense urban locations where cell handovers happen regularly.

Also included in the technology is Samsung’s mobile analytics tool, available to mobile operators. This tool further helps with the delivery of rich multimedia by locating the cause of video degradation along a network, allowing network operators to identify elements of their network are underperforming so that they can remedy it swiftly.