A High-Performance Media Streaming Architecture Based on KVM

A media streaming server can be implemented on a virtual machine for the ease of resource management. However, simply running a media streaming server on a virtual machine has two problems, the duplicate data in file caches of virtual machines and the performance degradation caused by the virtualization overhead. In order to resolve these problems, this paper proposes a high-performance media streaming architecture based on KVM. First, we implement a shared cache among virtual machines in order to eliminate the duplicate cached data. Second, the send file operation is offloaded to the hypervisor to reduce the virtualization overhead in I/O operations. Our evaluations with D-DASH datasets show that the performance of a media streaming server in the proposed architecture is increased by up to 30% as compared to that of the conventional media streaming server that simply runs on a virtual machine.