Analyzing the Potential Benefits of CDN Augmentation Strategies for Internet Video Workloads

Video viewership over the Internet is rising rapidly, and market pre-dictions suggest that video will comprise over 90 % of Internet traf-fic in the next few years. At the same time, there have been signs that the Content Delivery Network (CDN) infrastructure is being stressed by ever-increasing amounts of video traffic. To meet these growing demands, the CDN infrastructure must be designed, pro-visioned and managed appropriately. Federated telco-CDNs and hybrid P2P-CDNs are two content delivery infrastructure designs that have gained significant industry attention recently. We ob-served several user access patterns that have important implica-tions to these two designs in our unique dataset consisting of 30 million video sessions spanning around two months of video view-ership from two large Internet video providers. These include par-tial interest in content, regional interests, temporal shift in peak load and patterns in evolution of interest. We analyze the impact of our findings on these two designs by performing a large scale measurement study. Surprisingly, we find significant amount of synchronous viewing behavior for Video On Demand (VOD) con-tent, which makes hybrid P2P-CDN approach feasible for VOD and suggest new strategies for CDNs to reduce their infrastructure costs. We also find that federation can significantly reduce telco-CDN provisioning costs by as much as 95%