Youtube traffic characterization: a view from the edge

  • Authors:

  • Phillipa Gill;Martin Arlitt;Zongpeng Li;Anirban Mahanti

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada;HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada;University of Calgary, Calgary, CA;Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

This paper presents a traffic characterization study of the popular video sharing service, YouTube. Over a three month period we observed almost 25 million transactions between users on an edge network and YouTube, including more than 600,000 video downloads. We also monitored the globally popular videos over this period of time. In the paper we examine usage patterns, file properties, popularity and referencing characteristics, and transfer behaviors of YouTube, and compare them to traditional Web and media streaming workload characteristics. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of the observed characteristics. For example, we find that as with the traditional Web, caching could improve the end user experience, reduce network bandwidth consumption, and reduce the load on YouTube's core server infrastructure. Unlike traditional Web caching, Web 2.0 provides additional meta-data that should be exploited to improve the effectiveness of strategies like caching.