A Novel Distribution Service Policy for Crowdsourced Live Streaming in Cloud Platform

Dynamic requests of viewers from sparse and dispersed locations for crowdsourced-live-streaming (CSLS) service make current cloud service providers (CSPs) inadequate to provide sufficient quality of experience (QoE). To solve this issue, we propose a multi-CDN-assisted-CSLS (MCACLS) architecture, a novel cloud architecture complemented by multiple content delivery networks (Multi-CDNs). MCACLS architecture can enhance a CSP's capacity of video distribution service and improve the quality of CSLS service for end-users while reducing the overall operational cost. MCACLS adaptively adjusts resources between a CSP and its leased CDN service in a fine granularity to deal with the volatility of user requests. However, scheduling resources cost-effectively in response to user requests from different regions is a critical issue that must be addressed. We formulate the above problem into a constrained stochastic optimization problem and propose an algorithm based on the Nash bargaining solution. Our proposed algorithm makes trade-off between QoE of users and the overall operational cost for CSPs. Illustrative studies validate the advantages of MCACLS and show that it is more cost-effective, reducing the overall operational cost by up to 15% compared with other alternatives while achieving sufficient QoE for viewers.