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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