Investigating Redundant Internet Video Streaming Traffic on iOS Devices: Causes and Solutions

The Internet has witnessed rapidly increasing streaming traffic to various mobile devices. In this paper, through analysis of a server-side workload and experiments in a controlled lab environment, we find that current practice has introduced a significant amount of redundant traffic. In particular, for the popular iOS based mobile devices, accessing popular Internet streaming services typically involves about 10%-70% redundant traffic. Such a practice not only over-utilizes and wastes resources on the server side and the network (cellular or Internet), but also consumes additional battery power on user´s mobile devices and leads to possible monetary cost. To alleviate such a situation without changing the server side or the client side, we design and implement CStreamer that can transparently work between existing mobile clients and servers. We have implemented a prototype and installed on Amazon EC2. Experiments conducted based on this prototype show that CStreamer can completely eliminate the redundant traffic without degrading user´s QoS.