A socially-aware ISP-friendly mechanism for efficient content delivery

The ongoing growth of the Internet traffic is largely due to video delivery platforms as well as to online social networks (OSNs), where both popular and long-tail content, such as user-generated content (UGC), is shared. UGC is not dealt with effectively by the traditional approaches of Web caches and CDNs, as it has different demand patterns: it is more likely to be exchanged within a local geographic region and has a more even popularity distribution with fewer popular objects. In this work, we propose an ISP-friendly mechanism for enhancing content delivery exploiting social information extracted from OSNs, e.g. social relationships, common interests and locality of content exchange, as a new `source' of meta-information to characterize and predict the end-user's behavior. The basic components of our mechanism called SEConD are: (i) a socially-aware proxy server inserted in a local geographic region (e.g. an AS) to orchestrate content distribution, (ii) socially-aware messaging overlays employed to trigger video prefetching, (iii) content-based P2P overlays employed to perform video streaming in each region, and (iv) a two-level caching strategy both in the socially-aware proxy server and in the OSN user's device (UD) whenever online. We also develop an evaluation framework to simulate the generation of content in the environment of an OSN, in order to evaluate our mechanism and compare it with other approaches in the literature. The evaluation results show that our mechanism improves users' Quality of Experience (QoE) and simultaneously, reduces traffic in potentially expensive inter-domain links, as well as the origin content server contribution. Thus, the SEConD mechanism can lead to benefits for all involved stakeholders, i.e., ISPs, OSNs, CDNs, and end-users. The proposed mechanism is widely applicable, since it is deployable by ISPs, OSNs, as well as CDNs distributing content on behalf of an OSN provider.