1 A Geometric Approach to Server Selection for Interactive Video Streaming Yaochen Hu, Di Niu Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Alberta fyaochen,
[email protected] Zongpeng Li Department of Computer Science University of Calgary
[email protected] Abstract—Many distributed interactive multimedia applica- provisioned and high-bandwidth backbone networks. Third, tions, such as live video conferencing and video sharing, require a large part of mixing and processing jobs can be done by each participating client to transmit its captured video stream to servers, relieving the computational burden of users. other clients via relay servers. We consider connecting multiple clients through a multiple relay servers and study the server In this paper, we ask the questions—how can the choices selection problem from a dense pool of CDN edge locations and of server locations affect end-to-end delays between clients datacenters to reduce the end-to-end delays between clients. To in interactive video/audio streaming applications? Is a single achieve scalability in the presence of a large number of candidate server sufficient, or can we reduce end-to-end delays by using servers, we formulate server selection as a geometric problem in multiple relay servers spread at different locations? And where a delay space instead of in a graph, which turns out to be an extension of the well known Euclidean k-median problem. We should these relay servers be placed? As a toy example, if 3 propose practical approximation schemes when using only one clients in Paris are in a meeting with 3 other clients in Sao or two servers with theoretical worst-case guarantees as well Paulo, having two inter-connected servers placed in the two as fast heuristics when using k servers.