research-article

A Longitudinal View of Netflix: Content Delivery over IPv6 and Content Cache Deployments

Authors:

Trinh Viet Doan,

Vaibhav Bajpai, and

Sam CrawfordAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

July 2020

Pages 1073 - 1082

https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM41043.2020.9155367

Published: 06 July 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We present an active measurement test (netflix) that downloads content from the Netflix content delivery network. The test measures latency and achievable throughput as key performance indicators when downloading the content from Netflix. We deployed the test on ~100 SamKnows probes connected to dual-stacked networks representing 74 different origin ASes. Using a ~2.75 year-long (Jul 2016–Apr 2019) dataset, we observe Netflix Open Connect Appliance (OCA) infrastructure to be highly available, although some vantage points experience low success rates connecting over IPv6. We witness that clients prefer connecting to Netflix OCAs over IPv6, although the preference over IPv6 tends to drop over certain peak hours during the day. The TCP connect times toward the OCAs have reduced by ~40% and the achievable throughput has increased by 20% over the measurement duration. We also provision scamper right after the netflix test to capture the forwarding path toward the Netflix OCAs. We observe that the Netflix OCA caches deployed inside the ISP are reachable within six IP hops and can reduce IP path lengths by 40% over IPv4 and by half over IPv6. Consequently, TCP connect times are reduced by 64% over both address families. The achieved throughput can~ also increase by a factor of three when such ISP caches are used to stream content. This is the first study to measure Netflix content delivery from residential networks, since the inception of the Netflix CDN infrastructure in 2011. To encourage reproducibility of our work, an anonymized version of the entire longitudinal dataset is publicly released.

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Cited By

Visser CFontugne R(2024)Inside the Engine Room: Investigating Steam’s Content Delivery Platform Infrastructure in the Era of 100GB GamesPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-56249-5_2(32-60)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-56249-5_2
Viola RMartín ÁZorrilla MMontalbán JAngueira PMuntean G(2023)A Survey on Virtual Network Functions for Media Streaming: Solutions and Future ChallengesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/356782655:11(1-37)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3567826

Index Terms

A Longitudinal View of Netflix: Content Delivery over IPv6 and Content Cache Deployments
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
2. Networks

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IEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

Jul 2020

2647 pages

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Published: 06 July 2020

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Cited By

Visser CFontugne R(2024)Inside the Engine Room: Investigating Steam’s Content Delivery Platform Infrastructure in the Era of 100GB GamesPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-56249-5_2(32-60)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-56249-5_2
Viola RMartín ÁZorrilla MMontalbán JAngueira PMuntean G(2023)A Survey on Virtual Network Functions for Media Streaming: Solutions and Future ChallengesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/356782655:11(1-37)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3567826

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