Analyzing the Impact of Dropbox Content Sharing on an Academic Network

Cloud storage services (e.g., Dropbox) are a popular means for sharing content and performing collaborative work. Yet, content sharing via cloud might result in bandwidth wastage when repetitive data is downloaded by different users in the same network domain. This paper first characterizes sharing patterns in Dropbox by analyzing data collected from a campus network for 4 months. We identify that the volume of data sharing in such homogeneous environment is reasonably high. Next, we use the characterization results to implement a synthetic workload generator that allows us to test alternatives for the Dropbox synchronization protocol. We then propose a synchronization architecture that includes network caches to temporarily hold user updates. Our evaluation of the proposed solution indicates that, even with a small cache, it is possible to achieve almost the maximum possible reduction of downloads from remote servers, thus benefiting storage providers, end users and the Internet.