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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service for multimedia conferencing that simplifies service provisioning and enhances scalability by using conferencing-specific substrates instead of traditional VMs, with a prototype and performance evaluation.

Contribution

It presents a novel PaaS architecture for multimedia conferencing that leverages conferencing substrates, enabling dynamic composition and scalable provisioning.

Findings

Prototype implementation demonstrates feasibility.

Performance measurements show acceptable scalability.

Conferencing substrates improve provisioning flexibility.

Abstract

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.