Multicast at Edge: An Edge Network Architecture for Service-Less Crowdsourced Live Video Multicast

Using smartphones, tablets, and other portable/handheld devices, we have become more reliant on the video streaming services for entertainment and remote work. Mobile data traffic has grown eighteen folds over the past five years accounting for the majority of IP traffic. YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Twitch, DouYu and other streaming as well as video conferencing services have increased in popularity so at any given moment they serve thousands of live video streams to millions of users. The Enhanced Multimedia Broadcast Multimedia Service (eMBMS) is the standard multicast protocol for 5G networks. Cellular multicast has gained considerable attention to efficiently utilize the limited spectrum to transmit multimedia content to cellular sites with co-located viewers, lowering the cost, and maximizing the Quality of Experience (QoE). However, popular live video content providers use unicast mode for live video delivery and have limited support in the eMBMS service-oriented network architecture. In this paper, we propose an overlay network architecture to augment eMBMS to address the limitations of the standard eMBMS architecture and enable service-less multicast for crowdsourced live video providers. We propose a Virtual Network Function (VNF) service that identifies potential multicast scenarios based on user requests for a live video within a confined area. The VNF Application Server collects information, validates a potential multicast scenario, and initiates an ad-hoc multicast service on the fly. We use a real-world dataset of Facebook Live videos to evaluate the proposed architecture. The simulation results depict considerable advantages in terms of cost, efficiency, and Quality of Experience (QoE). Our results show that the proposed architecture provides significant benefits in bandwidth saving at the backhaul, transit, and RAN links.