Improving Multimedia Content Delivery via Augmentation With Social Information: The Social Prefetcher Approach

A significantly large proportion of HTTP traffic results from bandwidth-intensive multimedia content circulating through online social networks (OSNs). With multimedia content providers, such as YouTube, often relying on content delivery network (CDN) infrastructures, the pursuit lies in exploiting the user activity extracted from OSNs to improve the content prefetching mechanism. Aiming to reduce bandwidth usage, we incorporated a dynamic mechanism to CDNsim, a stand-alone CDN traffic simulator. This mechanism is based on a dynamic policy that takes patterns of information transmission over OSNs into account. Herein, we demonstrate that the performance of CDNs can be improved, and the cost of copying to surrogate servers is taken into consideration.