RocketStreams: A Framework for the Efficient Dissemination of Live Streaming Video

Abstract

Live streaming video accounts for major portions of modern Internet traffic. Services like Twitch and YouTube Live rely on the high-speed distribution of live streaming video content to vast numbers of viewers. For popular content the data is disseminated (replicated) to multiple servers in data centres (or IXPs) for scalable, encrypted delivery to nearby viewers. In this paper we sketch our design of RocketStreams, a framework designed to facilitate the high-performance dissemination of live streaming video content. RocketStreams removes the need for live streaming services to design complicated data management and networking solutions, replacing them with an easy-to-use API and backend that handles data movement on behalf of the applications. In addition to its support for TCP-based communication, RocketStreams supports CPU-efficient dissemination over RDMA, when available. We demonstrate the utility of RocketStreams for providing live streaming video dissemination by modifying a web server to make use of the framework. Preliminary results show that RocketStreams performs similarly to Redis on dissemination nodes. On delivery nodes, RocketStreams reduces CPU utilization by up to 54% compared to Redis, and therefore supports up to 27% higher simultaneous viewer throughput. When using RDMA, RocketStreams supports up to 73% higher ingest traffic on dissemination nodes compared with Redis, reduces delivery node CPU utilization by up to 95%, and supports up to 55% more simultaneous viewers.