Inside the bird's nest: measurements of large-scale live VoD from the 2008 olympics

  • Authors:

  • Hao Yin;Xuening Liu;Feng Qiu;Ning Xia;Chuang Lin;Hui Zhang;Vyas Sekar;Geyong Min

  • Affiliations:

  • Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;ChinaCache Co., Ltd, Beijing, China;Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China;Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;University of Bradford, Bradford, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The 2008 Beijing Olympics was an interesting event from a VoD perspective because it involved near real-time video delivery at massive scales over multiple days of a high-profile event. We present some measurement-driven insights into this event through a unique dataset obtained from ChinaCache, the largest CDN in China. The dataset is unique in three respects. First, it gives a "white-box" view into user access patterns which would otherwise be impossible. Second, since the CDN serves different content providers, it allows to compare and contrast the effects of different presentation models on end users. Third, the nature of the content itself is vastly different from traditional VoD systems in terms of the real-time and event-driven nature, which gives rise to unique effects. The dataset allows us to investigate a wide range of interesting issues: (1) how the live nature of the events causes differences in access patterns compared to traditional VoD and User-Generated Content (UGC) systems, (2) how the presentation models affect user behavior, and (3) flash-crowd phenomena. Based on these observations, we discuss implications for future live VoD systems.