Resource, Data and Application Management for Cloud Federations and Multi-Clouds

Abstract: Distributed Real-Time Media Processing refers to classes of highly distributed, delay no-tolerant applications that account for the majority of the data traffic generated in the world today. Real-Time audio/video conferencing and live content streaming are of particular research interests as technology forecasts predict video traffic surpassing every other type of data traffic in the world in the near future. Live streaming refers to applications in which audio/video streams from a source need to be delivered to a set of geo-distributed destinations while maintaining low latency of stream delivery. Real-time conferencing platforms are application platforms that implement many-to-many audio/video real-time communications. Both of these categories exhibit high sensitivity to both network state (latency, jitter, packet loss, bit rate) as well as stream processing backend load profiles (latency and jitter introduced as Cloud processing of media packets). This thesis addresses enhancing real-time media processing both at the network level parameters as well as Cloud optimisations.We provide a novel, bandwidth management algorithm, for cloud services sharing the same network infrastructure, which provides a 2x improvement in system stability. Further examining network impact on cloud services, we provide a novel hybrid Cloud-Network distributed Cloud architecture to enable locality aware, application enhancements. This architecture led to a multi-cloud management overlay algorithm that maintains low management overhead on large scale cloud deployments. On the application level we provide a study of Media Quality parameters for a WebRTC enabled Media Cloud back-end, and provide patterns of quality metrics with respect to back-end stream load and network parameters. Additionally we empirically show that a "minimal load" algorithm for stream allocation, outperforms other Rotational, or Static Threshold based algorithms.