Scalable, Multi-Regional Real-Time Communication Services Over QUIC

Real-time services are everywhere in our lives, including activities such as voice calls, live streaming, and cloud gaming. These services face significant challenges, such as scalability, availability, and maintenance burden due to high demand. To address these challenges, we propose a new architecture that leverages the QUIC protocol to provide multi-cloud/multi-region media services that can be scaled beyond the limits of the current real-time services. Our architecture eliminates the need for communication between the control plane and the data plane, resulting in even higher scalability. We compare our architecture based on load and delay distribution to Jitsi, a commercially available distributed video-conferencing service, within a Kubernetes multi-region environment. Our findings show that our architecture can achieve comparable or superior performance compared to existing solutions, while giving better scalability. This study demonstrates the potential to improve real-time services by strategically locating media servers closer to end users.