Streaming media over the Internet: Flow based analysis in live access networks

Multimedia service delivery over the Internet is a success. The number of services available and the number of people accessing them is huge. In this paper, we investigate multimedia streaming services over the Internet. Our analysis is based on traffic measurement in live access fiber-to-the-home networks. We study parameters like traffic volume and flow characteristics for selected services. Especially the Swedish P2P video service Voddler and the Swedish P2P music service Spotify are studied. We show that indeed these services are widely used (20% of local hosts using Voddler, 65 % of local hosts using Spotify). We also show that they are different concerning the flow characteristics, with many short flows for Voddler and longer flows for Spotify. One thing that they have in common in our measurements is that the outbound, or uplink, traffic volume is larger than the inbound.