A Cloud Platform-as-a-Service for Multimedia Conferencing Service Provisioning

Multimedia conferencing is the real-time exchange of multimedia content between multiple parties. It is the basis of a wide range of applications (e.g., multimedia multiplayer game). Cloud-based provisioning of the conferencing services on which these applications rely will bring benefits, such as easy service provisioning and elastic scalability. However, it remains a big challenge. This paper proposes a PaaS for conferencing service provisioning. The proposed PaaS is based on a business model from the state of the art. It relies on conferencing IaaSs that, instead of VMs, offer conferencing substrates (e.g., dial-in signaling, video mixer and audio mixer). The PaaS enables composition of new conferences from substrates on the fly. This has been prototyped in this paper and, in order to evaluate it, a conferencing IaaS is also implemented. Performance measurements are also made.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, IEEE ISCC 201

A Cloud-Based Architecture for Multimedia Conferencing Service Provisioning

Multimedia conferencing is the real-time exchange of multimedia content between multiple parties. It is the basis of several interactive multiuser applications, such as distance learning and multimedia multiplayer online games. The cloud-based provisioning of the conferencing services on which these applications rely on can have several benefits, including the easy provisioning of new applications, efficient use of resources, and elastic scalability. This paper proposes a holistic cloud-based architecture for conferencing service provisioning, which covers both the infrastructure and platform layers of the cloud. The proposed infrastructure layer offers conferencing substrates-as-a-service (e.g., dial-in signaling, video mixing, and audio mixing), instead of virtual machines or containers. The platform layer abstracts the details of the conferencing concepts and offers a high-level interface to simplify conference service provisioning for a wide range of service and application providers (experts versus non-experts). It also enables the on-the-fly scaling of the running conferences while guaranteeing the required quality of service, enables substrates composition to create new conferencing services, and eases the reuse of conferencing services in building new applications. The presented architecture is supported by a proof-of-concept prototype and performance measurements. The latter provides the analysis of resource allocation efficiency and response time, as well as the scalability of the system under suboptimal and over-provisioned conditions. It also provides recommendations for service providers regarding the best alternatives for provisioning their service

A Cloud Platform-as-a-Service for Multimedia Conferencing Service Provisioning

Multimedia Conferencing is the real-time exchange of media content (e.g. voice, video and text) between multiple participants. It is the basis of a wide range of conferencing applications such as massively multi-player online games and distance learning applications. For faster development as well as cost efficiency, developers of such conferencing applications can use conferencing services (e.g. dial-in audio conference) provided by third-parties. However, the third-party service providers face several challenges with respect to conferencing service provisioning (i.e. service development, deployment and management). One challenge is mastering complex low-level details of conferencing technologies, protocols and their interactions. Another challenge is resource elasticity. Number of conference participants varies during runtime. So resource utilization in an elastic manner is a critical factor to achieve cost efficiency. Cloud Computing can help tackle these challenges. It is a paradigm for swiftly provisioning a shared pool of configurable resources (e.g. services, applications, network and storage) on demand. It has three main service models: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Using a PaaS, service providers can provision conferencing services easily and offer them as SaaS. Nonetheless, cloud-based provisioning of conferencing services still remains a big challenge due to the shortcomings of existing PaaS. In this thesis, a PaaS architecture for conferencing service provisioning is proposed. It is based on a business model from the state of the art. It relies on conferencing IaaSs that, instead of VMs, offer conferencing substrates (e.g. dial-in signaling, video mixer and audio mixer). The conferencing PaaS enables composition of new conferences from substrates on the fly. Moreover, it provides conferencing service providers, who are experienced in programming, with high-level interfaces to abstract the internal complexities of conferencing. In order for PaaS to scale ongoing conferences elastically, an algorithm is also presented in this thesis. The conferencing PaaS is prototyped and performance measurements are made. The proposed algorithm’s performance is also evaluated

Architectures and Algorithms for Cloud-Based Multimedia Conferencing

Multimedia conferencing is the real-time exchange of multimedia content between multiple parties. It is the basis of several applications, such as distance learning, online meetings, and massively multiplayer online games. Cloud-based provisioning of multimedia conferencing has several benefits, like resource efficiency, elasticity, and scalability. However, it remains very challenging. A challenge, for instance, is the lack of holistic architectures which cover both the infrastructure and the platform layers of cloud-based multimedia conferencing applications. Another challenge is the lack of appropriate algorithms for resource allocation in the conferencing cloud to accommodate the fluctuating number of participants, while meeting the required quality of services (QoS). Yet another example is the lack of suitable algorithms for scaling the multimedia conferencing applications in the cloud while meeting both QoS requirements and cost efficiency objective. Unfortunately, the solutions proposed so far do not address these challenges. This thesis focuses on the architectural and algorithmic challenges of cloud-based multimedia conferencing. It proposes architectural components and interfaces for multimedia conferencing application provisioning, covering both the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layers. The proposed interfaces simplify multimedia conference service provisioning for a wide range of application providers. On the algorithmic side, it proposes resource allocation mechanisms that support scalability in terms of the number of participants while meeting the QoS. These mechanisms allocate the actual resources (e.g., CPU, RAM, and storage) in an optimal manner. Besides these mechanisms, it proposes the scalability approaches for cloud-based multimedia conferencing applications. To ensure cost efficiency, these proposed solutions enable fine-grained scalability of the applications with respect to the number of participants while considering the QoS requirements. All algorithmic problems in this thesis are formulated using the Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and heuristics have been designed and validated to solve them

A Cloud Infrastructure for Multimedia Conferencing Applications

Conferencing enables the conversational exchange of media between several parties. Conferencing applications are among important enterprise applications nowadays. However, fine grained scalability and elasticity remain quite elusive for multimedia conferencing applications, although they are key to efficiency in the resource usage. Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm for provisioning network, storage, and computing resources on demand using a pay-per-use model. Cloud-based conferencing services can inherent several benefits such as resource usage efficiency, scalability and easy introduction of different types of conferences. This thesis relies on a recently proposed business model for cloud-based conferencing. The model has the following roles: conferencing substrate provider, conferencing infrastructure provider, conferencing platform provider, conferencing service provider, and broker. Conferencing substrates are generally atomic and served as elementary building blocks (e.g. signalling, mixing) of conferencing applications. They can be virtualized and shared among several conferencing applications for resource efficiency purposes. Multiple conferencing substrates provided by different conferencing substrate providers can be combined to build a conferencing service (e.g. a dial-out signalling substrate and an audio mixer substrate can be composed to build a dial-out audio conference service). This thesis focuses on the conferencing infrastructure provider and conferencing substrate provider roles. It proposes a virtualized cloud infrastructure for multimedia conferencing applications. This infrastructure relies on fine grained conferencing substrates (e.g. dial-out signalling, dial-in signalling, audio mixer, video mixer, floor control, etc.) and offers several advantages in addition to fine grained scalability and elasticity (e.g. assembling substrates on the fly to build new conferencing applications). An architecture is proposed to realize the roles of conferencing infrastructure provider, conferencing substrate provider and their interactions. A resource allocation mechanism for conferencing substrates is also proposed. We have also built a prototype with Xen as the virtualization platform and validated the architecture. Performance has also been evaluated

Reporting an Experience on Design and Implementation of e-Health Systems on Azure Cloud

Electronic Health (e-Health) technology has brought the world with significant transformation from traditional paper-based medical practice to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-based systems for automatic management (storage, processing, and archiving) of information. Traditionally e-Health systems have been designed to operate within stovepipes on dedicated networks, physical computers, and locally managed software platforms that make it susceptible to many serious limitations including: 1) lack of on-demand scalability during critical situations; 2) high administrative overheads and costs; and 3) in-efficient resource utilization and energy consumption due to lack of automation. In this paper, we present an approach to migrate the ICT systems in the e-Health sector from traditional in-house Client/Server (C/S) architecture to the virtualised cloud computing environment. To this end, we developed two cloud-based e-Health applications (Medical Practice Management System and Telemedicine Practice System) for demonstrating how cloud services can be leveraged for developing and deploying such applications. The Windows Azure cloud computing platform is selected as an example public cloud platform for our study. We conducted several performance evaluation experiments to understand the Quality Service (QoS) tradeoffs of our applications under variable workload on Azure.Comment: Submitted to third IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing (CGC 2013

A scalable WebRTC platform based on open technologies

International Conference on Computer, Information and Telecommunication Systems (7th, 2018, Colmar, Francia

Design and evaluation of automatic workflow scaling algorithms for multi-tenant SaaS

Current Cloud software development efforts to come up with novel Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications are, just like traditional software development, usually no longer built from scratch. Instead more and more Cloud developers are opting to use multiple existing components and integrate them in their application workflow. Scaling the resulting application up or down, depending on user/tenant load, in order to keep the SLA, no longer becomes an issue of scaling resources for a single service, rather results in a complex problem of scaling all individual service endpoints in the workflow, depending on their monitored runtime behavior. In this paper, we propose and evaluate algorithms through CloudSim for automatic and runtime scaling of such multi-tenant SaaS workflows. Our results on time-varying workloads show that the proposed algorithms are effective and produce the best cost-quality trade-off while keeping Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in line. Empirically, the proactive algorithm with careful parameter tuning always meets the SLAs while only suffering a marginal increase in average cost per service component of approximate to 5-8% over our baseline passive algorithm, which, although provides the least cost, suffers from prolonged violation of service component SLAs