Rethinking web content distribution in the social media era

We are witnessing the beginnings of a shift in the patterns of content creation and exchange over the web. Previously, web content—including web pages, images, audio, and video—was primarily created by a small set of entities and was delivered to a large audience of web users. However, recent trends such as the rise in popularity of online social networking; the ease of content creation using digital devices like smartphones, cameras, and camcorders; and the ubiquity of Internet access have democratized content creation. Now, individual Internet users are creating content that makes up a significant fraction of Web traffic [3, 9]. As a result, compared to content shared over the web just a few years ago, content today is generated by a large number of users located at the edge of the network, is of more uniform popularity, and exhibits a workload that is governed by the social network. Unfortunately, existing content distribution architectures—built to serve more traditional workloads—are ill-suited for these new patterns of content creation and exchange. For example, web caches have been shown to exhibit poor performance on social networking content [5, 18], due to the more uniform popularity of content, causing many online social networking sites have begun to move away from content distribution networks (CDNs) and towards highly-engineered in-house delivery solutions [10,11,15].