Sensing User-Generated Multimedia Traffic

Abstract

Internet traffic is increasingly dominated by user-generated content, predominantly by multimedia content (photos and videos). The content is primarily shared in online social networks (OSNs) such as Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook. In this paper, we inspect the traffic imposed by user-generated multimedia content in OSNs. To do so, we developed Viewcount, a Facebook application, in which participating users act as sensors for this study and help us to collect traces of user-generated multimedia traffic. Through analyzing social activities around user-generated multimedia content (such as user demographics and viewing distributions), we drew insightful observations correlating demographics and social activities to network traffic. These observations shed light on the design of next-generation platforms for sharing user-generated multimedia content.