Finding service paths in a media service proxy network

With the deployment of multimedia service proxies at different locations in the networks, it is possible to create an application-level media service proxy network. Examples of media services offered by this network include media data adaptation, transformation, protection, enhancement, recovery, and different combinations of them. Multimedia sources and clients will then connect to this network and create customized, value-added, and composite media service delivered by one or more proxies in the media service proxy network. In this paper, we focus on the problem of finding multimedia service path in the media service proxy network. A service path is a chain of media service proxies between a media source and a media client. With dynamic changes in proxy capacity and connection bandwidth between the proxies, our goal is to find the 'best' path with respect to end-to-end resource availability for each service path request. Our solution includes (1) a mechanism to monitor and propagate resource availability information in the media service proxy network and (2) an algorithm to find the best service path based on the resource monitoring results. Its main features include: (1) the resource monitoring mechanism provides reasonable accuracy and stability, while incurring controlled overhead; (2) the service path finding algorithm finds the best path for each service path request, and achieves high overall success rate among all requests; and (3) it is an application-level solution, and does not require changes to the lower-level network infrastructure.