Scalable request routing for VR-ready CDNs

Abstract

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are witnessing the outburst of video traffic and must get ready for streaming services based on Virtual Reality (VR). The immersive experience that VR provides for live events or video on demand dramatically increases the need for network and computing resources and VR sessions are foreseen to be elephants flows in service providers' infrastructures. This paper analyzes the challenges of request routing in VR-ready CDNs and argues that decisions must be taken at a finer granularity compared to today's practice. To make such decisions at scale, we propose a hybrid control framework, called VR-ready Admission Control (VRAC), to decompose and solve the underlying optimization problem in real-time. We demonstrate in a realistic setting that it will be decisive to withstand the ever increasing penetration of data- hungry VR video streams.