Effectively minimizing redundant Internet streaming traffic to iOS devices

The Internet has witnessed rapidly increasing streaming traffic to various mobile devices. In this paper, we find that for the popular iOS based mobile devices, accessing popular Internet streaming services typically involves about 10%-70% unnecessary redundant traffic. Such a practice not only over-utilizes and wastes resources on the server side and the network (cellular or Internet), but also consumes additional battery power on users' mobile devices and leads to possible monetary cost. To alleviate such a situation without changing the server side or the iOS, we design and implement a CStreamer prototype that can transparently work between existing iOS devices and media servers. We also build a CStreamer iOS App to enable end users to access Internet streaming services via CStreamer. Experiments conducted based on this prototype running on Amazon EC2 show that CStreamer can completely eliminate the redundant traffic without degrading user's QoS.