2011/11/03 by Ashwin Rao, Rao, Ashwin, Yeon-sup Lim +9
Computer Science · #Caching and Content Delivery #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Image and Video Quality Assessment #Multimedia (cs.MM) #Network Traffic and Congestion Control #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1111.0948
openalex publication_date 2011/11/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.