Multicast at Edge: An Edge Network Architecture for Service-Less Crowdsourced Live Video Multicast

Kamran Zahoor,Mohsen Guizani,Aiman Erbad,Amr Mohamed,Kashif Bilal

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3070814

Abstract

Using smartphones, tablets, and other portable/handheld devices, we have become more reliant on the video streaming services for entertainment and remote work. Mobile data traffic has grown eighteen folds over the past five years accounting for the majority of IP traffic. YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Twitch, DouYu and other streaming as well as video conferencing services have increased in popularity so at any given moment they serve thousands of live video streams to millions of users. The Enhanced Multimedia Broadcast Multimedia Service (eMBMS) is the standard multicast protocol for 5G networks. Cellular multicast has gained considerable attention to efficiently utilize the limited spectrum to transmit multimedia content to cellular sites with co-located viewers, lowering the cost, and maximizing the Quality of Experience (QoE). However, popular live video content providers use unicast mode for live video delivery and have limited support in the eMBMS service-oriented network architecture. In this paper, we propose an overlay network architecture to augment eMBMS to address the limitations of the standard eMBMS architecture and enable service-less multicast for crowdsourced live video providers. We propose a Virtual Network Function (VNF) service that identifies potential multicast scenarios based on user requests for a live video within a confined area. The VNF Application Server collects information, validates a potential multicast scenario, and initiates an ad-hoc multicast service on the fly. We use a real-world dataset of Facebook Live videos to evaluate the proposed architecture. The simulation results depict considerable advantages in terms of cost, efficiency, and Quality of Experience (QoE). Our results show that the proposed architecture provides significant benefits in bandwidth saving at the backhaul, transit, and RAN links.

Highlights

Using smartphones, tablets, and other portable/handheld devices, we have become more reliant on video streaming services for entertainment and remote work
In this paper, we propose EdgeCast, an adaptive multicast solution based on NFV to reduce the data transmitted by Content Delivery Network (CDN), bandwidth usage, resource blocks usage (RAN link load) of live video streaming in the wireless cellular network
EdgeCast adaptively sets up multicast groups according to potential wireless multicast scenarios

Summary

Introduction

Tablets, and other portable/handheld devices, we have become more reliant on video streaming services for entertainment and remote work. AND RELATED WORK eMBMS architecture has been discussed in the literature in general for performance evaluation of broadcast and multicast techniques. This evaluation has been conducted for various aspects of LTE multicast that include, network slicing for multicasting traffic [15], MBMS-based architectures [13], [16] along with effective cooperative strategies [17]–[20]. These strategies include scheduling techniques [21], [22], caching and multicast techniques [23]–[26], and physical layer analysis [27], [28]. This study presents a high level architectural design to instantiate the ad-hoc multicast bearer while optimizing the traffic load on the backhaul, fronthaul, and RAN links

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Conclusion