Mobile Video Ad Caching On Smartphones

It is clear today that mobile video is a major traffic source and that online advertising is a steadily growing business. These trends are leading towards mobile video advertising becoming ubiquitous. We make two contributions towards better understanding mobile video ads and how their impact on mobile device resources can be minimized. We perform the first characterization of a well-defined set of mobile video ads on YouTube, the largest online video service. We then use our findings to design a video ad caching system for smartphones, aiming at minimizing the number of ad downloads to relieve mobile devices from the extra overhead induced by the ever increasing amount of ads. Our trace-driven simulations show that our caching system can save up to 50% data transfer.