When YouTube Does not Work—Analysis of QoE-Relevant Degradation in Google CDN Traffic

Abstract

YouTube is the most popular service in today's Internet. Google relies on its massive content delivery network (CDN) to push YouTube videos as close as possible to the end-users, both to improve their watching experience as well as to reduce the load on the core of the network, using dynamic server selection strategies. However, we show that such a dynamic approach can actually have negative effects on the end-user quality of experience (QoE). Through the comprehensive analysis of one month of YouTube flow traces collected at the network of a large European ISP, we report a real case study in which YouTube QoE-relevant degradation affecting a large number of users occurs as a result of Google's server selection strategies. We present an iterative and structured process to detect, characterize, and diagnose QoE-relevant anomalies in CDN distributed services such as YouTube. The overall process uses statistical analysis methodologies to unveil the root causes behind automatically detected problems linked to the dynamics of CDNs' server selection strategies.