BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT IN A CONTENT DISTRIBUTION NETWORK

A system and method in which each node in a Content Distribution Network (CDN) maintains information about the most-recent state of the CDN as a whole to decide what bandwidth to use when serving a content subscriber so that the total bandwidth of the entire multimedia content streamed/delivered to the subscriber through various nodes in the CDN remains within a pre-defined bandwidth cap for the subscriber. The entire CDN is thus treated as a single edge node. Each node in a CDN may periodically transmit to all other nodes in the CDN, information about any activity that occurs at the transmitting node. Instead of reporting to all the nodes, the transmitting node may report details of its node-specific activity to a subset of “interested” nodes. Once each node has a model of what the entire CDN system is currently doing, that node can implement bandwidth management in a coherent manner.