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Deploying a Multipoint Control Unit in the Cloud: Opportunities and Challenges

Authors:
Alvaro Alonso
Pedro Rodriguez
Joaquin Salvachua
Javier Cerviño

Keywords: Cloud Computing; MCU; multimedia.

Abstract:
A Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) is a software component that manages different aspects of multimedia systems: mixing, forwarding, recording or transcoding media streams. This paper shows how Cloud infrastructures offer new opportunities to MCUs in a range of scenarios, scaling to a variable number of users. However, this deployment also implies some important challenges that need to be solved, considering the MCU functionalities and the common scenarios in which it will be used. These challenges are related to up and down scalability, geographic distribution of the users and the MCU system profiling. We provide an overview of the most effective solutions to face them and the characterization of a previously developed MCU in two videoconference scenarios. A Cloud-based MCU provides important advantages to take into account and the challenges we detected are already solved in similar environments making its deployment a promising research area.

Pages: 173 to 178

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: May 27, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-271-4

Location: Valencia, Spain

Dates: from May 27, 2013 to June 1, 2013