SWITCH-ing from multi-tenant to event-driven videoconferencing services

摘要

Full mesh is the most commonly used networking topology in Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) based videoconferencing (VC) applications, however, due to its inherently poor scaling capability it is not appropriate for multi-party VC with many participants. Solutions based on centralized media server infrastructures are used to leverage the scaling problem. Service providers adopting centralized approach need to ensure good resource utilization to lower the price, and at the same time provide good Quality of Experience (QoE) to the end users. In practice, even with todays advanced cloud technologies, these two conflicting goals are difficult to achieve simultaneously. In order to tackle this complex problem, we propose an innovative event-driven model, that differs from the traditional multi-tenant service provisioning model. In this work, the architecture and implementation of a WebRTC event-driven multi-party VC, based on Software as a Service (SaaS) principles is presented. A prototype was developed on top of Docker containers and Kubernetes container orchestration technologies, which in our opinion represent key enabling technologies fostering the migration from multi-tenant towards event-driven architectures. The technology readiness to support such time-critical applications is evaluated. The initial results suggest that although there are some trade-offs in terms of performance/resource consumption, our fully functional prototype allows for on-the-fly media server instance creation and destruction in arbitrary cloud provider infrastructure with still acceptable application usability.