


All the files that you store in your dropbox folder are likely stored on US servers. Since dropbox uses the Amazon infrastructure, it is surprising that they do not seem to use Amazon datacenters outisde the US. This implies a long round-trip-time for the large population of dropbox users who do not reside in North America. First, despite its popularity, dropbox is still provided from servers located mainly in the US. Several of the findings of this paper are very interesting. In a paper that will be presented this fall at IMC’12, Idilio Drago and his colleagues provide a very detailed analysis of the dropbox protocol and its usage in home and campus networks. The dropbox application is easy to use, but few is known open the operation of the underlying protocol. It heavily relies on the amazon EC2 and AWS services. dropbox is probably one of the most widely known storage services. These cloud storage services use proprietary protocols and allow users to exchange files and share folders efficiently. Another service whose usage is growing are the cloud-based storage services like dropbox, icloud, skydrive or GDrive.

Measurement studies show that video is consuming more and more bandwidth in the global Internet. Understanding the dropbox protocol and quantifying the usage of cloud storage services
