Network Characteristics of Video Streaming Traffic
Abstract
Video streaming represents a large fraction of Internet traffic. Surprisingly, little is known about the network characteristics of this traffic. In this paper, we study the network characteristics of the two most popular video streaming services, Netflix and YouTube. We show that the streaming strategies vary with the type of the application (Web browser or native mobile application), and the type of container (Silverlight, Flash, or HTML5) used for video streaming. In particular, we identify three different streaming strategies that produce traffic patterns from non-ack clocked ON-OFF cycles to bulk TCP transfer. We then present an analytical model to study the potential impact of these streaming strategies on the aggregate traffic and make recommendations accordingly.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1111.0948,
title = {Network Characteristics of Video Streaming Traffic},
author = {Ashwin Rao and Yeon-Sup Lim and Chadi Barakat and Arnaud Legout and Don Towsley and Walid Dabbous},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1111.0948},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
This is the author version of the paper accepted as a full paper at ACM CoNEXT 2011