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 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