Cloud boffins build cheap content delivery network in the cloud

Take a bit of cloud, add a bit of money, and stir in a bit of boffinry, and you could build your very own content distribution network (CDN).

That's the conclusion of a Canadian/Chinese/American research project, who've put together what they call a “generic framework” for crowd-sourced live-streaming using AWS and Microsoft cloud resources.

The main focus of the research, presented in this paper on Arxiv, was to look at how people collaborating on video could get the kind of performance the big names of media get out of CDNs.

The researchers used the resources of the Planetlab along with the AWS EC2 and Microsoft Azure clouds to “deal with service migration among cloud instances of diverse lease prices”.

They also created an adaptive leasing approach that lets them provision cloud services to “accommodate geo-distributed video crowdsourcers”.

Since the researchers wanted to represent a real-world-like environment, in which contributors to a video might be using anything from a video camera to a smartphone, their cloudy CDN also had to cope with live transcoding between different video bitrates and formats (both for upload and download).

The clients in the test were hosted in 398 nodes of the academic Planetlabs network.

For the cloud services, the researchers deployed Unbuntu 14.04 LTS and VLM in 18 AWS and Microsoft sites – nine in America, three in Europe and six in the Asia Pacific. The CloudFront CDN service was deployed to all edge locations.

Basic latency tests allowed the Planetlab node to pick the preferred cloud size to use as its upload target, with ffmpeg measuring the frame loss.

The researchers' tests delivered crowdsourced, cloud-leased streaming at between $US4.77 and $US5.84 per hour for live streams from seven sources to the 398 “audience” machines in Planetlabs. ®