Distributing very-large content from cloud to smart home hubs: Measurement and implications

With recent proliferation of smart home hubs, public cloud storage service is facing a significant challenge of distributing very large content to end users. In these services, many delivered files are of size of tens of GB (even up to hundreds of GB for 4K resolution videos), and the fraction of very-large files keeps increasing. By observing a commercial cloud storage and distribution service, we notice the issue of excessive intra-datacenter network traffic for distributing very-large files, which seriously affects the quality of service and scalability. Based on the measurement results and the analysis of the issue, we propose cache-based methods (in both static and dynamic schemes) to help reduce the large volume of intra-datacenter traffic. Our proposals are evaluated on the chunk-level traces from one of the biggest commercial cloud storage and distribution service providers in China. The cache-based approach can reduce the maximum intra-datacenter traffic significantly in a cost-effective manner.