CAREER: Developing a Flexible Serverless Multimedia Streaming Cloud Platform

随着多媒体流成为许多应用程序不可或缺的一部分，人们希望构建一种特殊用途的平台，以支持流服务的快速开发，并以强大且经济高效的方式在边缘到云的连续体中提供这些服务。因此，该项目的目标是设计具有高级管理抽象的多媒体流云(MSC)平台，以获得连续统的好处，同时隐藏使用连续统的复杂性。MSC促进了功能即服务的计算范式，并提供了对象即服务(OaaS)的抽象，作为一流公民来表示各种流媒体来源，从而减轻了用户和开发人员的资源和数据管理困难。OaaS支持跨连续体灵活迁移对象，也加速了流媒体服务的发展。保持对象的状态有助于无缝地迁移对象，从而实现了对象在边缘到云的连续体中的弹性和移动性。MSC通过在异构云资源上运行的智能任务管理和资源分配方法，为每个流对象提供经济高效和健壮的服务质量。开发了MSC平台的开源原型，并通过录音设备、本地边缘计算系统和公共云进行了测试，以评估其可用性和健壮性。MSC平台使多媒体流变得大众化，并为基于多媒体流的下一代应用奠定了基础。MSC将为流提供商成为面向解决方案的提供商铺平道路，让他们专注于开发先进的流服务，并将其整合到他们的应用程序中。该项目的成果不仅将影响科学发现的前沿，还将通过跨各种应用提供灵活而强大的流媒体服务来造福社会。MSC平台的对象抽象和智能资源分配方法可以适用于其他软实时计算系统。该项目将通过将应用程序整合到分布式计算课程中来影响计算机科学和IT教育。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

As multimedia streaming is becoming an integral part of many applications, there is a desire to build a special-purpose platform that enables rapid development of streaming services and accommodates them in a robust and cost-efficient manner across the edge-to-cloud continuum. Accordingly, the goal of this project is to design the Multimedia Streaming Cloud (MSC) platform with high-level management abstractions that can reap the benefits of the continuum while hiding the complexity of working with it. MSC promotes the Function-as-a-Service computing paradigm and offers the Object-as-a-Service (OaaS) abstraction as a first-class citizen to represent various streaming sources, hence, relieving the users and developers from both the resource and data management difficulties. OaaS enables flexible migration of the objects across the continuum and accelerates the development of streaming services too. Preserving the object's state facilitates seamless object migration, hence, elasticity and mobility of objects across the edge-to-cloud continuum are achieved. MSC offers cost-efficient and robust QoS to each streaming object via smart task management and resource allocation methods operating on heterogeneous cloud resources. An open-source prototype of the MSC platform is developed and tested via recording devices, a local edge computing system, and a public cloud to assess its usability and robustness. The MSC platform democratizes multimedia streaming and lays the foundation for the next generation applications operating based on multimedia streaming. MSC will pave the way for stream providers to become solution-oriented and let them focus on developing advanced streaming services and integrate them to their applications. The project results will impact not only the forefront of scientific discovery, but also benefit the society by offering flexible and robust streaming services across various applications. The object abstraction and the intelligent resource allocation methods of the MSC platform can be adapted to and employed in other soft real-time computing systems. The project will impact computer science and IT education by integrating applications into the distributed computing curriculum.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.