Cloud Media Processing - Embedded Community - Intel

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• Media Processing as a Service (MPaaS) provides access to specialized platforms, APIs or fullyintegrated applications that analyze and modify media data streams. These applications leverage functions such as audio and video mixing, multimedia transcoding, recording and playing a media stream, detecting the “loudest talker” or noisy connections, and applying voice or video quality enhancements. Types of Cloud Computing Clouds are classified as public, private, hybrid or community, based on the entities providing computing resources and networks. A public cloud uses the mainstream public Internet, which is operated by and shared across many external organizations. This model is typical for hosted conferencing service providers. A private cloud is operated for a single organization and is common among enterprises for data security, corporate governance and reliability reasons. A hybrid cloud combines both public and private clouds. A community cloud is setup for a common interest group, and the infrastructure is maintained by its members. Transition to the Cloud— What Does It Mean? Cloud computing is creating a paradigm shift that is closely aligned to guiding tenets around how computing resources are accessed and consumed, some of which are listed in Table 1. As a result, customers of cloud services can take advantage of new features, like dynamic resource allocation and consumption-based pricing models, that increase their agility and flexibility. From the perspective of telecom service providers, an industry migrating to cloud-based services is likely to experience fundamental shifts related to infrastructure, business models and competition. Drawing on insights from Morgan Keegan 5 at Equity Research, some of these changes include: Cloud Media Processing | Radisys White Paper Tenets Implications Abstract Resources Substitute references to physical servers and hard drives with instances and volumes. Cloud resources are fungible. 4 On-Demand Provisioning Get more resources right when they’re needed. Give back unnecessary resources. Scalability in Minutes Scale out or in depending on usage needs. Pay per consumption Don’t pay for resources after they’ve been turned off. Automation Increase automation using APIs. The cloud provides access to scriptable infrastructure. Table 1. Tenants of Cloud Computing Infrastructure: • New on-premises infrastructure deployments give way to cloud-based systems located offsite. • Transcoding-intensive digital signal processors are substituted with virtualized COTS infrastructure based on Intel ® multi-core processor technology. • Large, upfront equipment expenditures are replaced by recurring fee (rent) payment models. Business Model: • ‘Conferencing as a business’ transitions to ‘conferencing as a service.’ • Interoperability requirements expand from dedicated equipment to all computing devices. Competition: • New entrants take advantage of lower barriers to entry provided by cloud computing. • Greater reliance on public networks levels the playing field. • Improved interoperability enables new partnership opportunities. 4
Overcoming Challenges Around MPaaS The motivations for the industry to consider cloud computing, and more specifically media processing as a service, are usually grounded on the financial benefits. That is why cloud computing is also characterized as a financial model first, but then also needs to be balanced with technical realities in delivering a real-time telecommunications service. Leveraging cloud computing for IP media services requires changes to the underlying network architecture in order to adapt the new ways data and applications will move between customer machines and central offices/data centers. For example, public access networks need to be upgraded to deliver greater bandwidth, higher quality of service (QoS) and improved reliability, among other things. Moreover, MPaaS must run on shared computing platforms and meet stringent QoS requirements despite the reliance on public networks, which are far less predictable than private networks. The following sections describe many of the challenges facing networking and telecom solution providers in the delivery of MPaaS, and how Radisys solutions are helping to address them. Real-time Network Performance Traditional Internet applications do not have strict real-time performance constraints. Most users wouldn’t complain if a web page download took a half second or longer, whereas such a delay is unacceptable for audio and video communications. Based on user perception studies, most people consider the benchmark of 150 milliseconds (ms) as the maximum tolerable delay for a satisfactory voice call. If the delay is greater, users will notice the delay, which will negatively impact the communications experience. Today, many telecom service providers choose to purchase their own IP media processing equipment and QoS-enabled IP network infrastructure in order to deliver the real-time network performance needed to ensure an acceptable quality of experience (QoE) for subscribers. Likewise, control over equipment is especially critical for service providers who implement Cloud Media Processing | Radisys White Paper virtual private networks (VPNs) designed to improve IP communications quality through better performance, lower delay and less jitter than the Internet. When quality of experience is a top priority, it’s imperative that service providers test the end-to-end network performance of IP media services at maximum load. The same is true for those deploying IP media services on cloud infrastructure; it is important to closely look at the network performance, along with the costs for delivering that performance, with your service provider. Radisys Solution: Real-time performance is designed into Radisys media servers, enabling both DSP hardware-based and software-based versions in virtualized environments running on Intel ® multicore processors to satisfy comparable latency specifications. Employing patented technology, all Radisys media servers (see sidebar: Media Servers in the Cloud) implement a real-time control layer that sits on top of the operating system. This layer enhances DSP, multi-core and multi-processor architectures by providing real-time optimizations specifically tuned for the deterministic response times needed for IP media processing. The Radisys Software Media Server also utilizes Intel ® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel ® IPP)— an extensive library of multi-core-ready, highly optimized software functions for multimedia and communications applications. Intel ® IPP functions deliver parallel performance beyond what optimized compilers alone can deliver, enabling Radisys to execute packet and jitter buffer processing within the strict 5-millisecond packet processing increments required by in high-performance telecommunication applications using Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) media streams. In addition, the resource manager differentiates processing tasks (‘hard-real-time’ versus ‘nearreal-time’) and distributes them independently. Ensuring the hard-real-time processes have sufficient computing power, the resource manager reallocates CPU, DSP, memory and I/O resources as needed. This optimizes application performance based on the available computing resources, thus reducing cost for a given performance level. 5
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