Multi-Tier Edge-to-Cloud Architecture for Adaptive Video Delivery

In the last few years, there has been a rapid proliferation of a wide range of real-time video services and applications. These technologies flood the wireless systems with video content on a daily basis. As a result of this sharp increase in video traffic, the prospect of errors due to network interference and congestion rises. Incidentally, the adoption of the 5th generation of wireless systems (5G) will allow this growth to be even greater due to its high bandwidth capacity and low latency. However, even with these improvements on the wireless capabilities, a reliable and high-quality video transmission still imposes several challenges, such as how to handle a large number of heterogeneous devices and how to better use the resource-richer Edge, Fog, and Cloud computing sources to meet the user's requirements. To overcome these issues, this work proposes a multi-tier video delivery architecture relying upon several technologies such as Multi-access Edge computing (MEC), 5G slices, and microservice placement/chaining. Furthermore, to assess the proposed idea an experimental proof-of-concept testbed of the multi-tier architecture was designed, implemented, and evaluated using real-world tools and actual video sequences. The results obtained supported our claim that a multi-tier video delivery system is feasible and can greatly benefit the end-users.