vSkyConf: cloud-assisted multi-party mobile video conferencing

  • Authors:
  • Yu Wu;Chuan Wu;Bo Li;Francis C.M. Lau

  • Affiliations:
  • The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong;The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong;Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Hong Kong;The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Mobile cloud computing
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

As an important application in today's busy world, mobile video conferencing facilitates people's virtual face-to-face communication with friends, families and colleagues, via their mobile devices on the move. However, how to provision high-quality, multi-party video conferencing experiences over mobile devices is still an open challenge. The fundamental reason behind is the lack of computation and communication capacities on the mobile devices, to scale to large conferencing sessions. In this paper, we present vSkyConf, a cloud-assisted mobile video conferencing system to fundamentally improve the quality and scale of multi-party mobile video conferencing. By novelly employing a surrogate virtual machine in the cloud for each mobile user, we allow fully scalable communication among the conference participants via their surrogates, rather than directly. The surrogates exchange conferencing streams among each other, transcode the streams to the most appropriate bit rates, and buffer the streams for the most efficient delivery to the mobile recipients. A fully decentralized algorithm is designed to decide the best paths of streams and the most suitable surrogates for video transcoding along the paths, such that the limited bandwidth is fully utilized to deliver streams of the highest possible quality to the mobile recipients. We also carefully tailor a buffering mechanism on each surrogate to cooperate with efficient stream distribution. We have implemented vSkyConf based on Amazon EC2 and verified the excellent performance of our design, as compared to the widely adopted unicast solutions.