Web services such as YouTube which allow the distribution of user-produced media have recently become very popular. YouTube-like services are different from existing traditional VoD services because the service provider has only limited control over the creation of new content. We analyze how the content distribution in YouTube is realized and then conduct a measurement study of YouTube traffic in a large university campus network. The analysis of the traffic shows that: (1) No strong correlation is observed between global and local popularity; (2) neither time scale nor user population has an impact on the local popularity distribution; (3) video clips of local interest have a high local popularity. Using our measurement data to drive trace-driven simulations, we also demonstrate the implications of alternative distribution infrastructures on the performance of a YouTube-like VoD service. The results of these simulations show that client-based local caching, P2P-based distribution, and proxy caching can reduce network traffic significantly and allow faster access to video clips.

Date Published: 28 January 2008
PDF: 13 pages
Proc. SPIE 6818, Multimedia Computing and Networking 2008, 681805 (28 January 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.774903

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6818:
Multimedia Computing and Networking 2008
Reza Rejaie; Roger Zimmermann, Editor(s)