Self-adaptable media service architecture for guaranteeing reliable multimedia services

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to design and develop a Self-Adaptable Media Service Architecture (SAMSA) for providing reliable dynamic composite multimedia service through policy-based actions. The multimedia services such as media retrieval, transcoding, scaling and display services are combined based on the preferences of the user to create a dynamic composite multimedia service called as Video-on-Demand service. Such distributed multimedia services deployed using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be accessed in heterogeneous environments that are prone to changes during run-time. To provide reliable and adaptive multimedia services, a powerful self-adaptable architecture with dynamic compositions of multimedia services is necessary to adapt during run-time and react to the environment. The adaptability in this proposed architecture is achieved by enabling the service providers to Monitor, Analyze and Act on the defined policies that support customization of compositions of multimedia services and guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning. The Media Service Monitor (MSM) observes the business and quality metrics associated with the multimedia services during run-time. The monitored results are analyzed by Monitored Results Analyzer (MRA) which identifies the type and location of the fault. The Adaptive Media Service Manager (AMSM) takes corrective actions based on the monitored results, through the policies defined as an extension of WS-Policy (Web Service--Policy framework). The effectiveness of the proposed Self-Adaptable Media Service Architecture (SAMSA) has been evaluated on Dynamic Composite Real-time Video-on-Demand Web Service (DCRVoDWS) for a maximum of 200 simultaneous client's requests. The analysis of results shows that the proposed architecture provides better improvement on reliability, response time and user satisfaction.