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Revealing the Load-Balancing Behavior of YouTube Traffic on Interdomain Links

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Passive and Active Measurement (PAM 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 10771))

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Abstract

For the last decade, YouTube has consistently been a dominant source of traffic on the Internet. To improve the quality of experience (QoE) for YouTube users, broadband access providers and Google apply techniques to load balance the extraordinary volume of web requests and traffic. We use traceroute-based measurement methods to infer these techniques for assigning YouTube requests to specific Google video content caches, including the interconnection links between the access providers and Google. We then use a year of measurements (mid-2016 to mid-2017) collected from SamKnows probes hosted by broadband customers spanning a major ISP in the U.S. and three ISPs in Europe. We investigate two possible causes of different interdomain link usage behavior. We also compare the YouTube video cache hostnames and IPs observed by the probes, and find that the selection of video cache has little impact on BGP selection of interdomain links.

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Acknowledgment

This work was partly funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 2014–2018 under grant agreement No. 644866, Scalable and Secure Infrastructures for Cloud Operations (SSICLOPS), and by U.S. National Science Foundation CNS-1414177. This work represents only the position of the authors, and not of funding agencies.

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Correspondence to Ricky K. P. Mok .

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Mok, R.K.P., Bajpai, V., Dhamdhere, A., Claffy, K.C. (2018). Revealing the Load-Balancing Behavior of YouTube Traffic on Interdomain Links. In: Beverly, R., Smaragdakis, G., Feldmann, A. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10771. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76481-8_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76481-8_17

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76481-8

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