Joint Transcoding Task Assignment and Association Control for Fog-Assisted Crowdsourced Live Streaming

The rapid development of content delivery networks and cloud computing has facilitated crowdsourced live-streaming platforms (CLSP) that enable people to broadcast live videos which can be watched online by a growing number of viewers. However, in order to ensure reliable viewer experience, it is important that the viewers should be provided with multiple standard video versions. To achieve this, we propose a joint fog-assisted transcoding and viewer association technique which can outsource the transcoding load to a fog device pool and determine the fog device with which each viewer will be associated, to watch desired videos. The resulting non-convex integer programming has been solved using a computationally attractive complementary geometric programming (CGP). The performance of the proposed algorithm closely matches that of the globally optimum solution obtained by an exhaustive search. Furthermore, the trace-driven simulations demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is able to provide adaptive bit rate (ABR) services.