Track Globally, Deliver Locally: Improving Content Delivery Networks by Tracking Geographic Social Cascades

Providers such as YouTube offer easy access to multimedia content to millions, generating high bandwidth and storage demand on the Content Delivery Networks they rely upon. More and more, the diffusion of this content happens on online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, where social cascades can be observed when users increasingly repost links they have received from others.

In this paper we describe how geographic information extracted from social cascades can be exploited to improve caching of multimedia files in a Content Delivery Network. We take advantage of the fact that social cascades can propagate in a geographically limited area to discern whether an item is spreading locally or globally. This informs cache replacement policies, which utilize this information to ensure that content relevant to a cascade is kept close to the users who may be interested in it.

We validate our approach by using a novel dataset which combines social interaction data with geographic information: we track social cascades of YouTube links over Twitter and build a proof-of-concept geographic model of a realistic distributed Content Delivery Network. Our performance evaluation shows that we are able to improve cache hits with respect to cache policies without geographic and social information.