Reports

Mobile Video Is Inefficient: A Traffic Analysis

Nam, Hyunwoo; Kim, Bong Ho; Calin, Doru; Schulzrinne, Henning G.

Video streaming on mobile devices is on the rise. According to recent reports, mobile video streaming traffic accounted for 52.8% of total mobile data traffic in 2011, and it is forecast to reach 66.4% in 2015. We analyzed the network traffic behaviors of the two most popular HTTP-based video streaming services: YouTube and Netflix. Our research indicates that the network traffic behavior depends on factors such as the type of device, multimedia applications in use and network conditions. Furthermore, we found that a large part of the downloaded video content can be unaccepted by a video player even though it is successfully delivered to a client. This unwanted behavior often occurs when the video player changes the resolution in a fluctuating network condition and the playout buffer is full while downloading a video. Some of the measurements show that the discarded data may exceed 35% of the total video content.

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Academic Units
Computer Science
Publisher
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Series
Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports, CUCS-018-13
Published Here
September 23, 2013