The Organizing Committee of the 14th International Workshop on Resilient Networks Design and Modeling (RNDM 2024) is pleased to announce that two outstanding papers have been selected to receive the RNDM 2024 Best Paper Award.
Adaptive Load Balancing for Multi-Tier CDN Edge Networks: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
Author: Yinan Qian
Award Details
About the Winning Paper
Modern content delivery networks operate across geographically distributed edge nodes arranged in multiple tiers, where fluctuating traffic patterns and regional demand spikes pose significant challenges to maintaining high availability, low latency, and cost efficiency. This paper introduces a novel reinforcement learning framework for adaptive load balancing across multi-tier CDN edge architectures.
The proposed approach dynamically learns optimal request routing policies by balancing latency objectives, origin offload efficiency, and node utilization constraints. Extensive trace-driven evaluations using real-world CDN traffic data demonstrate significant improvements over static and heuristic-based baselines â achieving up to 23% reduction in p95 latency, 18% improvement in cache hit ratio, and more robust performance under flash-crowd scenarios.
About the Author
Yinan Qian is an Infrastructure Engineer at Pinterest, Inc., where she works on CDN strategy, DNS configuration, and edge service architecture using Envoy proxy. She previously served as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services, contributing to the VPC Reachability Analyzer and Network Access Analyzer teams. She holds an M.S. in Software Engineering from Tufts University. Her research interests include network resilience, content delivery infrastructure, and adaptive routing algorithms.
Selection Process
The Best Paper Award was selected by the RNDM 2024 Technical Program Committee. Papers were evaluated on originality, technical quality, clarity of presentation, and potential impact. The RNDM 2024 committee recognized two outstanding papers of equal merit, each making significant contributions to the field of resilient networks. The awards were presented during the closing ceremony on 27 November 2024 at the Grand Hotel Vesuvio in Pompei.
About RNDM 2024
The 14th edition of the International Workshop on Resilient Networks Design and Modeling was held in Pompei/Napoli, Italy, from 25 to 27 November 2024. Organized by the University of Salerno in cooperation with the Gdansk University of Technology, the workshop featured over 30 technical presentations, two keynote speeches, and the Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards.