Analysis of User Demand Patterns and Locality for Youtube traffic

Video content constitutes a large share of residential
Internet traffic. The major source of video content as of today is
YouTube. In this paper, we analyse the user demand patterns for
YouTube in two metropolitan access networks with more than 1
million requests over three consecutive weeks in the first network
and more than 600,000 requests over four consecutive weeks in
the second network.
In particular we examine the existence of “local interest
communities”, i.e. the extent to which users living closer to each
other tend to request the same content to a higher degree, and
it is found that this applies to (i) the two networks themselves;
(ii) regions within these networks (iii) housholds with regions
and (iv) terminals within households. We also find that different
types of access devices (PCs and handhelds) tend to form similar
interest communities.
It is also found that repeats are (i) “self-generating” in the
sense that the more times a clip has been played, the higher the
probability of playing it again, (ii) “long-lasting” in the sense
that repeats can occur even after several days and (iii) “semiregular”
in the sense that replays have a noticeable tendency to
occur with relatively constant intervals.
The implications of these findings are that the benefits from
large groups of users in terms of caching gain may be exaggerated,
since users are different depending on where they live and
what equipment they use, and that high gains can be achieved
in relatively small groups or even for individual users thanks to
their relatively predicatable behaviour.