A distributed and virtualized infrastructure for networked multimedia services

This paper designs an infrastructure to meet the resource requirements, and more importantly, the QoS (quality of service) requirements for networked multimedia services. Learning from the successful experiences of distributed systems, the infrastructure deploys clusters of devices at the edge to improve the probability for end users to get satisfying QoS, and a two-layer management architecture is adopted accordingly. Moreover, a resource supply method based on virtualization and resource attributes is proposed. In the method, virtualized resources are packed and classified according to their purposes and functions, and each classification defines a minimum granularity, named service unit, to supply resources. Finally, to isolate traffic influence and guarantee network performance, each service is running on its isolated virtual network environment. The paper also presents the prototype system, and evaluates the feasibility and availability of it through experiments.