Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 23On the Impact of Online Social Networks in Content Delivery

Irene Kilanioti¹, Chryssis Georgiou¹, and George Pallis¹

¹Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

23.1 Introduction

As the task of content delivery networks (CDNs) is the improvement of Internet service quality via replication of the content from the origin to surrogate servers scattered over the Internet, the area of CDNs faces three major issues concerning the maximization of their overall efficiency [1, 2]: (i) the best efficient placement of surrogate servers with maximum performance and minimum infrastructure cost, (ii) the best content diffusion placement either in a global or in a local scale, that is, which content will be copied in the surrogate servers and to which extend, since this requires memory, time, and computational cost, and (iii) the temporal diffusion related with the most efficient timing of the content placement.

The increasing popularity of online social networks (OSNs) [3–5] and the growing popularity of streaming media have been noted as being the primary causes behind the recent increases in HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) traffic observed in measurement studies [6]. The amount of Internet traffic generated everyday by online multimedia streaming providers such as YouTube has reached huge numbers. Although it is difficult to estimate the proportion of traffic generated by OSNs, it is observed that there are more than 400 tweets per minute with a ...