An Elastic System Architecture for Edge Based Low Latency Interactive Video Applications

Abstract

5G and edge computing have brought great changes to video industry. Interactive video is becoming an emerging application form of multimedia service, which provides attraction beyond typical scenarios like cloud gaming and remote virtual reality (VR), and puts forward great challenges in resource capacity, response latency, and function flexibility to its service system. In this paper, we propose an elastic system architecture with low latency features to accommodate generic interactive video applications on near user edges. To increase system flexibility, we firstly design a dynamic Directed Acyclic Graph (dDAG) model for efficient task representation. Secondly, based on the model, we present the elastic architecture together with its scalable workflow pipeline. Thirdly, we propose a set of novel latency measurement metrics to analyze and optimize the performance of an interactive video system. Based on the proposed approaches, we disassemble a real world free-viewpoint synthesis application and benchmark its performance with the metrics. Extensive experimental results show the flexibility of our system to handle the stochastic human interactions during a video service session, with less than 5 ms additional scheduling latency introduced. End to end latency is kept within 43 ms for complex functions, and 28 ms for simpler scenarios, which satisfies the restrictions of most interactive video applications provided by an edge. Client of the architecture serves as a pure video player, which is also friendly to power limited terminals such as 5G phones. Efficiency and stability analyses of the system show superiorities over existing work, and also reveal potential optimization directions for future research.