Characterizing Web Services Provisioning via CDNs: The Case of Facebook

Today’s Internet consists of massive scale web services and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). This paper sheds light on the way major Internet-scale web services content is hosted and delivered. By analyzing a full month of HTTP traffic traces collected at the mobile network of a major European ISP, we characterize the paradigmatic case of Facebook, considering not only the traffic flows but also the main organizations and CDNs providing them. Our study serves the main purpose of better understanding how major web services are provisioned in today’s Internet, paying special attention to the temporal dynamics of the service delivery and the interplays between the involved hosting organizations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper providing such an analysis in mobile networks.