YouTube Traffic Content Analysis in the Perspective of Clip Category and Duration

Abstract—In this work, we study YouTube traffic characteristics in a medium-sized Swedish residential municipal network that has ∼ 2600 mainly FTTH broadband-connected households. YouTube traffic analyses were carried out in the perspective of video clip category and duration, in order to understand their impact on the potential local network caching gains. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time systematic analysis of YouTube traffic content in the perspective of video clip category and duration in a residential broadband network. Our results show that the requested YouTube video clips from the end users in the studied network were imbalanced in regarding the video categories and durations. The dominating video category was Music, both in terms of the total traffic share as well as the contribution to the overall potential local network caching gain. In addition, most of the requested video clips were between 2-5 min in duration, despite video clips with durations over 15 min were also popular among certain video categories, e.g. film videos. Keywords—Internet traffic monitoring, residential Interne