Migration-Based Dynamic and Practical Virtual Streaming Agent Placement for Mobile Adaptive Live Streaming

Abstract

Software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization have emerged as a promising solution for elastic, dynamic, and scalable network management. A collection of works have investigated how virtualization and cloud technology can ameliorate the infrastructure management for the fifth generation mobile network. However, employing these techniques in mobile network for live streaming has not received enough attention. By leveraging the development of SDN and virtualization techniques, mobile live streaming service providers can efficiently manage their system to cope with network dynamics incurred by the variation of the environment. Specifically, we dynamically instantiate network entities at appropriate locations in response to the user live streaming demands. These network entities are in charge of transcoding and transmitting the live videos to the mobile end users, which we name as virtual live streaming agent (vLA). In this paper, we investigate the dynamic virtualization and migration of vLAs for mobile live streaming services. Typically, rate adaptive streaming is adopted to improve spectrum efficiency and user quality of experience. We formulate an integer linear program for the optimal vLA placement problem. Furthermore, we design a practical SDN-based live vLA migration process. Then, by designing and integrating migration cost functions, we develop a dynamic vLA placement mechanism for dynamic environments with the consideration of migration cost. Both heuristic and on-line algorithms are designed for the vLA placement and migration problems. Finally, a large scale real trace-based simulation is conducted to demonstrate the performance of our vLA placement and migration algorithms.