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

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.