A Novel Distribution Service Policy for Crowdsourced Live Streaming in Cloud Platform

Dynamic requests of viewers from sparse and dispersed locations for crowdsourced-live-streaming (CSLS) service make current cloud service providers (CSPs) inadequate to provide sufficient quality of experience (QoE). To solve this issue, we propose a multi-CDN-assisted-CSLS (MCACLS) architecture, a novel cloud architecture complemented by multiple content delivery networks (Multi-CDNs). MCACLS architecture can enhance a CSP's capacity of video distribution service and improve the quality of CSLS service for end-users while reducing the overall operational cost. MCACLS adaptively adjusts resources between a CSP and its leased CDN service in a fine granularity to deal with the volatility of user requests. However, scheduling resources cost-effectively in response to user requests from different regions is a critical issue that must be addressed. We formulate the above problem into a constrained stochastic optimization problem and propose an algorithm based on the Nash bargaining solution. Our proposed algorithm makes tradeoff between QoE of users and the overall operational cost for CSPs. Illustrative studies validate the advantages of MCACLS and show that it is more cost-effective, reducing the overall operational cost by up to 15% compared with other alternatives while achieving sufficient QoE for viewers.

I. Introduction

User-generated video services have become popular all around the world with the dominance of high-performance smart phones and high-speed mobile networks. Crowdsourced live streaming (CSLS) service emerged in recent years is this kind of service that allows an individual to be an online broadcaster. There are many well-known platforms providing this new type of user-generated video service, such as Twitch.tv, YouTube Live and Douyu.tv. Taking Twitch.tv as an example, the number of viewers in the platform has increased from 20 million to 45 million in just three years [1]. The prevalence of CSLS service has attracted a lot of attention from academia and industry.¹

https://www.twitch.tv/

²

http://www.youtube.com/

³

https://www.douyu.com/