On-demand video streaming dominates today’s Internet traffic mix. For instance, Netflix constitutes a third of the peak time traffic in the USA. Nearly half of UK online households have accessed BBC’s shows through its on-demand streaming interface, BBC iPlayer. Using UK-wide traces from BBC iPlayer as a case study, this talk will characterise users’ content consumption at scale and discuss techniques that can be deployed at the edge by users to substantially decrease the load on the Internet. We will survey both well-known techniques such as peer-assisted video-on-demand, studying whether it works at scale, as well as new edge-caching mechanisms that can potentially be deployed today. We will conclude by exploring new directions for content-centric network architectures, to address the roots of the pain points observed in our user workload, in a “clean” fashion. This talk is based on a paper in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (to appear), 2 publications in IEEE INFOCOM 2015, as well as ongoing work and future directions.

Nishanth Sastry is a Senior Lecturer at King's College London. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK, a Master's degree from The University of Texas at Austin, and a Bachelor's degree from Bangalore University,India, all in Computer Science. He has over six years of experience in the Industry (Cisco Systems, India and IBM Software Group, USA) and Industrial Research Labs (IBM TJ Watson Research Center).