USITS 2001 Abstract
Measurement and Analysis of a Streaming-Media Workload
Maureen Chesire and Alec Wolman, University of Washington; Geoffrey M. Voelker, University of California, San Diego; and Henry M. Levy, University of Washington
Abstract
The increasing availability of continuous-media data is provoking a
significant change in Internet workloads. For example, video from news,
sports, and entertainment sites, and audio from Internet broadcast radio,
telephony, and peer-to-peer networks, are becoming commonplace. Compared
with traditional Web workloads, multimedia objects can require significantly
more storage and transmission bandwidth. As a result, performance
optimizations such as streaming-media proxy caches and multicast delivery are
attractive for minimizing the impact of streaming-media workloads on the
Internet. However, because few studies of streaming-media workloads exist,
the extent to which such mechanisms will improve performance is unclear.
This paper (1) presents and analyzes a client-based streaming-media
workload generated by a large organization, (2) compares media
workload characteristics to traditional Web-object workloads, and (3)
explores the effectiveness of performance optimizations on
streaming-media workloads. To perform the study, we collected traces
of streaming-media sessions initiated by clients from a large
university to servers in the Internet. In the week-long trace used
for this paper, we monitored and analyzed RTSP sessions from 4,786
clients accessing 23,738 distinct streaming-media objects from 866
servers. Our analysis of this trace provides a detailed
characterization of streaming-media for this workload.
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