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In this paper we conduct an extensive and in-depth study of traffic exchanged between YouTube data centers and its users, as seen from the perspective of a tier-1 ISP in Spring 2008 after YouTube was acquired by Google but before Google did any major restructuring of YouTube. Using flow-level data collected at multiple PoPs of the ISP, we first infer where the YouTube data centers are located and where they are connected to the ISP. We then deduce the load balancing strategy used by YouTube to service user requests, and investigate how load balancing strategies and routing policies affect the traffic dynamics across YouTube and the tier-1 ISP.
Adhikari et al. (Mon,) studied this question.