Regresar

Leasing videoconference resources on hybrid clouds

Abstract:

Since a few years ago developers have been increasing the number of applications and services that offer to their users the possibility of establishing videoconference sessions of multiple users through a web portal. Some of these systems allow the recording of their sessions. We can find examples of these portals such as WebEx 1, FlashMeeting 2 or Marte [172]. On the other hand, during this period some Internet portals have arisen to allow the users to upload their own recorded videos of lessons, conferences, etc. In these other portals the videos can also be accompanied with slides or presentations that have been used in the session. Examples of these services are Youtube 3, RTVDoc 4 or iTunesU 5. The great majority of these systems use Cloud Computing infrastructures in order to offer their services, either in the recording or in the storage of the generated videos. However, none of them offer a wide solution for creating, storing and distributing videos using Cloud technologies. At least at the moment of writing this paper we did not find an example of this kind of system. On the other hand, there are some works about systems that offer the possibility of creating hybrid clouds, such as OpenNebula [667], Zimory 6 or VMWare vCloud 7. The most common use case is a scenario where the developer uses any of the previous systems to provide the user with services which can be accessed through both public and private networks of an enterprise. More examples can be found in [718]. This chapter gives another reason for using hybrid clouds in the creation of services, that is to enhance the usage of resources efficiently. We think that there are a lot of systems that can be improved by deploying them on hybrid clouds instead of single provider clouds. We want to validate this concept by presenting a system that follows this principle. This work is part of the Global Project 8 and it is based on a service which offers to the users the possibility of scheduling videoconference sessions through a web portal (named GlobalPlaza 9). The users can attend each of these sessions through the web and even take part in the meetings that can be created with this application. With this tool several users should be able to join to a single videoconference session and control it. This control is based on the interaction modes that are set up at different moments (presentations, conferences, questions, etc.). The system presented takes into account the different resources needed in order to establish a videoconference and reacts accordingly. In this project, a new service that offers videoconferencing which can be accessed through different technologies has been created. These technologies can be summarized as SIP [334], web browser and Isabel application access, the latest being an application developed in our research group. We think that this work can be used by anyone who is interested in working on a different kind of hybrid cloud, because of the experience provided in this system. We propose this work as a starting point of Cloud videoconference systems which are aware of the use of the available resources and the costs that are generated by them. Section 22.3 introduces the main motivation of this research, explaining how hybrid architectures can work better in some scenarios. Section 22.4 gives us an example of the concepts presented in the previous section; this example is an implementation of a videoconference system that we have developed in our research group. Section 22.5 explains the validation of the system in terms of cost and resource usage. Finally, some conclusions are presented in Section 22.6.