Efficient data transmission in service workflows for distributed video content analysis

Abstract

Workflows of web services orchestrated by the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) have been successfully used in many business applications. Although these technologies were not originally designed for multimedia processing, they offer advantages to speed up the development of distributed multimedia analysis applications by allowing the composition or reconfiguration of existing services. However, in the case of service-oriented distributed video content analysis, a huge amount of binary data has to be transferred between different services. As a consequence, service orchestration based on BPEL leads to a performance bottleneck due to indirect message and data transport: the workflow engine receives results (which are potentially very large) from finished services and passes them to a subsequent service. In this paper, we present two novel approaches based on our previously developed Flex-SwA framework to model the binary data transmission between services in BPEL workflows. The proposed approaches circumvent the performance bottleneck at the orchestrating engine and provide efficient possibilities to transfer large data amounts as well as large data units. The first approach models the data flow in BPEL; the services exchange data directly. The second approach models the data flow outside of the BPEL engine and shifts it completely to the Flex-SwA framework. Experimental results for a video analysis workflow demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approaches.