A Cloud Platform-as-a-Service for Multimedia Conferencing Service Provisioning
This work addresses the problem of scalable and flexible service provisioning for applications like multimedia multiplayer games, but it appears incremental as it builds on an existing business model.
The paper tackles the challenge of cloud-based provisioning for multimedia conferencing services by proposing a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that composes conferences from conferencing substrates on the fly, with performance measurements conducted to evaluate it.
Multimedia conferencing is the real-time exchange of multimedia content between multiple parties. It is the basis of a wide range of applications (e.g., multimedia multiplayer game). Cloud-based provisioning of the conferencing services on which these applications rely will bring benefits, such as easy service provisioning and elastic scalability. However, it remains a big challenge. This paper proposes a PaaS for conferencing service provisioning. The proposed PaaS is based on a business model from the state of the art. It relies on conferencing IaaSs that, instead of VMs, offer conferencing substrates (e.g., dial-in signaling, video mixer and audio mixer). The PaaS enables composition of new conferences from substrates on the fly. This has been prototyped in this paper and, in order to evaluate it, a conferencing IaaS is also implemented. Performance measurements are also made.