GENI Cinema: An SDN-Assisted Scalable Live Video Streaming Service

This paper introduces GENI Cinema (GC), a system that provides a scalable live video streaming service based on dynamic traffic steering with software defined networking (SDN) and demand driven instantiation of video relay servers in NSF GENI's distributed cloud environments. While the service can be used to relay a multitude of video content, its initial objective is to support live video streaming of educational content such as lectures and seminars among university campuses. Users on any campus would bootstrap video upload or download via a public web portal and, for scalability, have the video delivered seamlessly across the network over one or multiple paths selected and dynamically controlled by GC. The architecture aims to provide a framework for addressing several well-known limitations of video streaming in today's Internet, where little control is available for controlling forwarding paths of on demand live video streams. GC utilizes GENI's distributed cloud servers to host on-demand video servers/relays and its Open Flow SDN to achieve seamless video upload/download and optimization of forwarding paths in the network core. This paper presents the architecture and an early prototype of the basic GC framework, together with some initial performance measurement results.