On scheduling live media streaming in the cloud — A study

Content Delivery Networks have become commonly used by content providers such as Netflix to deliver TV programmes to a large number of customers. This solution however breaks down when intensive processing is required and when content cannot be stored ahead of time, as is the case with live (real time) content. We study here resource management issues when a cloud infrastructure is used to deliver live content. More specifically, we look at the allocation of machines to host servers and how to keep that number as small as possible while meeting user demand. We express the problem as an online bin packing model and show how, by exploiting a simple property of the media, we can derive an efficient solution.