On the Impact of Online Social Networks in Content Delivery

This chapter presents the existing approaches that can be leveraged for the scaling of rich media content in content delivery networks (CDNs) using information from online social networks (OSNs). It also presents a taxonomy of the relative research, taking into account phenomena related with rich media content and its outspread via OSNs, and measurement studies on OSNs that could provide valuable insight into CDN infrastructure decisions for the replication of the content, as well as systems built with the leverage of OSNs' data. The properties and approaches that characterize the social cascades and affect the CDN performance are described. The chapter provides an outline of existing works that exploit information extracted from OSNs for the improvement of content delivery. Finally, it explores the key areas of interest concerning the diffusion of rich media content over OSNs.