Load and video performance patterns of a cloud based WebRTC architecture

Abstract

Web Real-Time Communication or Realtime communication in the Web (WebRTC/RTCWeb) is a prolific new standard and technology stack, providing full audio/video agnostic communications for the Web. Service providers implementing such technology deal with various levels of complexity ranging anywhere from: high service distribution, multi-client integration, P2P and Cloud assisted communication backends, content delivery, real-time constraints and across clouds resource allocation. This work presents a study of the joint factors including multi-cloud distribution, network performance, media parameters and back-end resource loads, in Cloud based Media Selective Forwarding Units for WebRTC infrastructures. The monitored workload is sampled from a large population of real users of our testing infrastructure, additionally the performance data is sampled both by passive user measurements as well as server side measurements. Patterns correlating such factors enable designing adaptive resource allocation algorithms and defining media Service Level Objectives (SLO) spanning over multiple data-centers or servers. Based on our analysis, we discover strong periodical load patterns even though the nature of user interaction with the system is mostly not predetermined with variable user churn.