Evaluating the Impact of Region Based Content Popularity of Videos on the Cost of CDN Deployment

Abstract

We investigate the impact of the content popularity of video streams in a local region and its impact on the CDN deployment cost. We have gathered real-world data from four popular classroom video streaming sites and analyzed the content caching to optimize the CDN deployment. Our traces contain metadata of around 31 thousand educational videos and approximately 100 million views in the education category of YouTube. From this analysis, we assert that region based content (e.g., NPTEL, India) follows Zipf law with low popularity exponent, and it is the region-based content popularity which most significantly impacts the CDN deployment cost.