Deploying external bandwidth guaranteed media server clusters for real-time live streaming in media cloud

PLoS One. 2019 Apr 3;14(4):e0214809. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0214809. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

The cloud-based media streaming service is a promising paradigm for multimedia applications. It is attractive to media streaming service providers, who wish to deploy their media server clusters in a media cloud at reduced cost. Since the real-time live streaming service is both a bandwidth-intensive and quality-sensitive application, how to optimize the internal bandwidth utilization of a data center network (DCN) as well as guarantee the external bandwidth of the real-time live streaming application, is a key issue of deploying virtual machine (VM)-hosted media server cluster in a media cloud. Therefore, in this study, we propose an external-bandwidth-guaranteed media server cluster deployment scheme in media cloud. The approach simultaneously considers the outside bandwidth requirement of a tree-based media server cluster for live streaming and the intra-bandwidth consumption of a DCN. The proposed scheme models the optimal problem as a new terminal-Steiner-tree-like problem and provides an approximate algorithm for placing the media servers. Our evaluation results show that the proposed scheme guarantees the external bandwidth requirement of a real-time live streaming application, at the same time, greatly reduces the intra-bandwidth utilization of a media cloud with different DCN structures.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Cloud Computing
  • Communications Media
  • Information Storage and Retrieval*
  • Video Recording

Grants and funding

This work is supported by The Fundamental Theory and Applications of Big Data with Knowledge Engineering under the National Key Research and Development Program of China with grant number 2016YFB1000903, the National Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61772414, 61532015, 61702400, 61532004, 61721002, 61472317, 61502379, the MOE Innovation Research Team No. IRT17R86, the Project of China Knowledge Centre for Engineering Science and Technology, and the consulting research project of Chinese academy of engineering “The Online and Offline Mixed Educational Service System for ‘The Belt and Road’ Training in MOOC China.” The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.