A novel architecture for efficient management of multimedia-service clouds

This paper presents a novel architecture for efficient management of multimedia-service clouds. The aim of the proposed architecture is to provide an optimal yet transparent customer access to specialized media editing, processing and adaptation services over these clouds. To achieve this goal, a hierarchy of virtual service models (VSMs) is built recursively; the leaf nodes of this hierarchy represent commonly accessed primitive services such as media caching, format transformation and color change. At higher levels, more complex services are built recursively using lower level VSMs as their building blocks. Each VSM represents a group of actual services offered on the cloud. A corresponding hierarchical service performance model is maintained to help the cloud broker in assigning appropriate services to requests of cloud customers. The performance model is built by collecting performance measurements from already serviced data streams in order to provide an up-to-date service performance view along the hierarchy. The architecture allows users to specify service requests at various levels of details, then an optimal primitive or a compound virtual service comprised of an optimal chain of virtual media services is selected. Performance results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed architecture.