Sharing Social Content from Home:A Measurement-driven Feasibility Study
Massimiliano Marcon Bimal Viswanath Meeyoung Cha Krishna Gummadi
NOSSDAV 201104/20/23 1
MPI-SWS MPI-SWS
MPI-SWSKAIST
Growth of social content
• Social content includes personal photos, videos, status updates– FB: 15 billion photos, 220 million weekly uploads
• Huge growth due to rising popularity of social networks
• Social content is often personal, users want control over:– What they share:– Whom they share with (access control, privacy)– How the content is being used (e.g. advertising)
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How is social content shared today?
• User generates content
• Content is uploaded to datacenter (e.g. Facebook)
• Datacenter delivers content via traditional Web– Web servers, CDNs
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Good side of current content sharing
• Performance and availability– OSNs use well-provisioned servers– Content accessible 24/7 from everywhere
• OSNs are storing content for users
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Bad side of current content sharing
• Restrictions on what / how much can be shared– Content type and quality
• Loss of ownership / copyrights– Terms of service of OSNs are complex– They may include broad rights on content, typically:
• Loss of privacy– OSNs privacy policies are complex, may change at any time– If malicious, OSNs can infringe on users’ privacy
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“worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content” (YouTube, Facebook, Flickr)
“worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content” (YouTube, Facebook, Flickr)
Users lose control over their data
Idea: What if we shared content from home?
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Personal home server
Can we preserve the good side?• Users must now store their content
– Idea: use cheap commodity storage
• Availability may decrease– Idea: use a cheap always-on residential gateway
• Performance may decrease– Because bandwidth of residential links is limited– Observation: personal content has often limited audience
• Cost– Example: Residential gateway + 1TB disk $140 one time ≅
cost (Amazon prices)– For comparison: 1TB/month on Amazon S3 = $95/month
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This talk
Is it feasible to share social content from home?– Characterize OSN workloads (Flickr/YouTube)
– Characterize home network environment
– Evaluate feasibility of content delivery from home
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Understanding OSN workloads
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How much content do users upload?
• Avg. total uploaded data:• 13.3MB Flickr• 103MB YouTube
• Very few users have >10GB
Shared photos/videos can easily fit in commodity storage1004/20/23
Users by uploaded content
How popular is the content?
Social workloads are not too demanding
• Never requested in 1 week:• 97% of Flickr pics• 50% of YouTube videos
• 94% of videos <100 views
• 90% YouTube users serve <7.6GB/week = 100Kbps
• Demands for Flickr much smaller
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This talk
Is it feasible to share social content from home?– Characterize OSN workloads (Flickr/YouTube)
– Characterize home network environment
– Evaluate feasibility of content delivery from home
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Characterization of home networks
• Configured home routers to gather measurements• Deployed them in 10 households (EU & Korea)• Collected 79 days worth of data about:
– Availability of gateways and local devices– Spare capacity of access links– Performance of content delivery
Goal: estimate availability and performance
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USB Storage
WLAN port
Availability of gateways/devices• Gateways periodically send heartbeat messages
– If no messages arrive in 5 min, gateway is disconnected
Content delivery from gateways provide high availability
Availability results
Gateway average 98%
Local device average 27%
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How much spare capacity in access links?
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• Gateways monitored utilization of access links– Recorded total upstream and downstream traffic values
80% of the time, upstream link is not used95% of the time, upstream traffic less than 15Kbps
This talk
Is it feasible to share social content from home?– Characterize OSN workloads (Flickr/YouTube)
– Characterize home network environment
– Evaluate feasibility of content delivery from home
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Performance of content delivery (photos)• Every 10 minutes, gateways fetch 20 60KB photos
– From Facebook– From a randomly chosen gateway among the home gateways
Photo delivery times
Percentile Facebook Testbed
50th 0.36 sec 1.91 sec
80th 0.81 sec 2.91 sec
95th 1.38 sec 5.32 sec
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Performance generally acceptable for browsingPhoto prefetching could improve it considerably
Performance of content delivery (videos)
• Every hour, gateways fetch an 18MB video– From Facebook– From a randomly chosen gateway in the testbed– Every second, throughput is recorded to simulate
streaming
• Can we support delivery of streaming content?
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Is there sufficient bandwidth for streaming content?
95% of the time, avg. bandwidth higher than 200Kbps66% of the time, avg. bandwidth higher than 400Kbps
Pre-buf. helps for high quality audio and YouTube-like bit-rates.
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Conclusions
• Social content sharing is very popular on OSNs– Current architectures results in loss of control over data
• Can we share social content from home?– Characterized social workload on Flickr/YouTube
• Volume of uploaded content easily fits on commodity storage• A lot of content is never requested• A lot of content is unpopular
• Estimated potential for home-based content delivery– Home gateways provide high availability– Promising for personal photos, and low bit-rate media
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Interesting future directions• How to deal with high-quality media?
– Idea: friends could help you deliver your content– Prefetching content could improve performance
• How to deal with very popular content?– Idea: They can be served from centralized
infrastructure
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