Deriving YouTube Playout Phases from Encrypted Packet Level Traffic

Abstract

From the point of view of telecommunication providers, video streaming is one of the most demanding applications in today's Internet. Over 73% of the total global network traffic has been attributed to video streaming applications in 2017. In this work, we provide a first step towards a better understanding of the packet level behavior of video streaming traffic to enable more efficient traffic engineering in the future. We perform a measurement study with the popular video streaming platform YouTube and show that the different playout phases of a video streaming session can not only be observed by evaluating application layer metrics, but also from raw and encrypted packet level traces.