A survey on YouTube streaming service

Abstract

Established in 2005, YouTube is one of the fastest-growing websites, and has become one of the most accessed sites in the Internet. It has a significant impact on the Internet traffic distribution, but itself is suffering from severe scalability constraints and quality of service. Understanding the features of YouTube is thus crucial to network traffic engineering and to sustainable development of this new generation of services. In this survey, we first present an overview of previous works and analysis on YouTube with a particular attention on Quality of Experience. We then describe how the increased availability of meta-data in Web 2.0 (e.g., popularity distribution of video clips) could be effectively exploited to improve the performance and scalability of YouTube. In particular, we study the benefit gained by local caching along with prefetching in terms of reducing the client access time and start up delay in watching video. Copyright © 2011 ICST.