Large scale characterisation of YouTube requests in a cellular network

Traffic from wireless and mobile devices is expected to soon exceed traffic from fixed devices. Understanding the behaviour of users on mobile devices is important in order to improve the offered services and the provision of the underlying network. Globally, more than 60% of consumer Internet traffic is estimated to be video traffic, and the most popular video website, YouTube, estimates that mobile access makes up nearly 40% of the global watch time. This paper presents the first work to study the characteristics of YouTube user requests on a nationwide cellular network. This study is based on the analysis of a large dataset generated by 3 million users and collected by a major telecom operator. We show for instance that 20% of the users generate 78% of the requests, and that over 80% of the requests target only 20% of the distinct videos accessed during the data collection period. Our results provide a comprehensive insight into the way people use YouTube on mobile devices, and show a very high potential for video cacheability on the cellular network.