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.