<title>Finding service paths in a media service proxy network</title>

A mechanism to monitor and propagate resource availability information in the media service proxy network and an algorithm to find the best service path based on the resource monitoring results, which achieves high overall success rate among all requests.

Abstract

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. Multimedia sources and clients will then be able to 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. 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.