Proceedings Article | 27 February 2015
KEYWORDS: Clouds, Video, Internet, Network architectures, Network security, Video surveillance, Analytical research, Image segmentation, Mobile communications, Web services
The latest trend to access mobile cloud services through wireless network connectivity has amplified globally among
both entrepreneurs and home end users. Although existing public cloud service vendors such as Google, Microsoft Azure
etc. are providing on-demand cloud services with affordable cost for mobile users, there are still a number of challenges
to achieve high-quality mobile cloud based video applications, especially due to the bandwidth-constrained and errorprone
mobile network connectivity, which is the communication bottleneck for end-to-end video delivery. In addition,
existing accessible clouds networking architectures are different in term of their implementation, services, resources,
storage, pricing, support and so on, and these differences have varied impact on the performance of cloud-based real-time
video applications. Nevertheless, these challenges and impacts have not been thoroughly investigated in the literature.
In our previous work, we have implemented a mobile cloud network model that integrates localized and decentralized
cloudlets (mini-clouds) and wireless mesh networks. In this paper, we deploy a real-time framework consisting of
various existing Internet cloud networking architectures (Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Eucalyptus Cloud) and a
cloudlet based on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud over wireless mesh networking technology for mobile cloud end users. It is
noted that the increasing trend to access real-time video streaming over HTTP/HTTPS is gaining popularity among both
research and industrial communities to leverage the existing web services and HTTP infrastructure in the Internet. To
study the performance under different deployments using different public and private cloud service providers, we employ
real-time video streaming over the HTTP/HTTPS standard, and conduct experimental evaluation and in-depth
comparative analysis of the impact of different deployments on the quality of service for mobile video cloud users.
Empirical results are presented and discussed to quantify and explain the different impacts resulted from various cloud
deployments, video application and wireless/mobile network setting, and user mobility. Additionally, this paper analyses
the advantages, disadvantages, limitations and optimization techniques in various cloud networking deployments, in
particular the cloudlet approach compared with the Internet cloud approach, with recommendations of optimized
deployments highlighted. Finally, federated clouds and inter-cloud collaboration challenges and opportunities are
discussed in the context of supporting real-time video applications for mobile users.
