An Intelligent Resource Reservation for Crowdsourced Live Video Streaming Applications in Geo-Distributed Cloud Environment

Crowdsourced live video streaming (livecast) services such as Facebook Live, YouNow, Douyu, and Twitch are gaining more momentum recently. Allocating the limited resources in a cost-effective manner while maximizing the quality of service (QoS) through real-time delivery and the provision of the appropriate representations for all viewers is a challenging problem. In our article, we introduce a machine-learning based predictive resource allocation framework for geo-distributed cloud sites, considering the delay and quality constraints to guarantee the maximum QoS for viewers and the minimum cost for content providers. First, we present an offline optimization that decides the required transcoding resources in distributed regions near the viewers with a tradeoff between the QoS and the overall cost. Second, we use machine learning to build forecasting models that proactively predict the approximate transcoding resources to be reserved at each cloud site ahead of time. Finally, we develop a greedy nearest and cheapest algorithm (GNCA) to perform the resource allocation of real-time broadcasted videos on the rented resources. Extensive simulations have shown that GNCA outperforms the state-of-the-art resource allocation approaches for crowdsourced live streaming by achieving more than 20% gain in terms of system cost while serving the viewers with relatively lower latency.