  Modern web services rely on Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to efficiently
deliver contents to end users. In order to minimize the experienced
communication cost, it is necessary to send the end user's requests to the
nearest servers. However, it is shown that this naive method causes some
servers to get overloaded. Similarly, when distributing the requests to avoid
overloading, the communication cost increases. This is a well-known trade-off
between communication cost and load balancing in CDNs.
  In this work, by introducing a new meta-heuristic algorithm, we try to
optimize this trade-off, that is, to have less-loaded servers at lower
experienced communication cost. This trade-off is even better managed when we
optimize the way servers update their information of each others' load. The
proposed scheme, which is based on Honeybee algorithm, is an implementation of
bees algorithm which is known for solving continuous optimization problems. Our
proposed version for CDNs is a combination of a request redirecting method and
a server information update algorithm.
  To evaluate the suggested method in a large-scale network, we leveraged our
newly developed CDN simulator which takes into account all the important
network parameters in the scope of our problem. The simulation results show
that our proposed scheme achieves a better trade-off between the communication
cost and load balancing in CDNs, compared to previously proposed schemes.
