Self-management of Live Streaming Application in Distributed Cloud Infrastructure

Currently, live streaming traffic is responsible for more than half of aggregated traffic from fixed access networks in North America. But, due to traffic redundancy, it does not suitably utilize bandwidth and network resources. To cope with this problem in the context of Distributed Clouds (DClouds) we present RBSA4LS, an autonomic strategy that manages the dynamic creation of reflectors for reducing redundant traffic in live streaming applications. Under this strategy, nodes continually assess the utilization level by live streaming flows. When necessary, the network nodes communicate and self-appoint a new reflector node, which switches to multicasting video flows hence alleviating network links. We evaluated RBSA4LS through extensive simulations and the results showed that such a simple strategy can provide as much as 40 % of reduction in redundant traffic even for random topologies and reaches 85 % of bandwidth gain in a scenario with a large ISP topology.