Internet DRAFT - draft-aazam-cdni-inter-cloud-architecture

draft-aazam-cdni-inter-cloud-architecture



Internet Engineering Task Force                          Mohammad Aazam
Internet-Draft		   Carleton University and Kyung Hee University	    
CDNI Working Group					    Eui-Nam Huh
Intended status: Informational                     Kyung Hee University
Expires: May 13, 2016     			 	    SooWong Kim
			               			       Alticast
                     				      November 14, 2015



                 Inter-Cloud Computing Architecture
        draft-aazam-cdni-inter-cloud-architecture-03

Abstract

   With the rapid rise in digital content, cloud computing has become 
   the focus of academia and industry. Cloud computing comes with 
   sophisticated technologies for data storage, management, and 
   distribution. Ubiquitous access facility and pay-as-you-go billing
   features are additional advantages associated with this paradigm.
   However, the massive digital content, more importantly multimedia,
   has to be managed in a more effective way. Heterogeneous cloud
   customers, accessing different customized services, with more advanced
   access networks and devices available today, makes it tough at times
   for solitary clouds to fulfill the needs. In such cases, different 
   clouds have to interoperate and federate their resources. This
   scenario is called inter-cloud computing of cloud federation. Since
   the concept of inter-cloud computing is still very new, it lacks
   standard architecture. This document focuses on presenting architectural
   fundamentals and key concerns associated with inter-cloud computing.

Status of This Memo

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   This Internet-Draft will expire on May 13, 2016.

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   Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
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   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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   publication of this document.  Please review these documents



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   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
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   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1
   2.  Related Work  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Media Cloud   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  Media Cloud Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.2.  Media Cloud Desing Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   4.  Media Cloud Architecture  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   5.  Media Cloud Inter-Cloud Computing Architecture. . . . . . . .   8
     5.1.  Inter-Cloud Entities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     5.2.  Inter-Cloud Topology Elements. .  . . . . . . . . . . . .   12
     5.3.  Inter-Cloud Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   13
     5.4.  Media Cloud Inter-Cloud Computing Protocols . . . . . . .   14
   6.  Major Issues in Interoperability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   16
   7.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   19
     8.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   19
   Appendix A.  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   22
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   22

1.  Introduction

   Digital media has convincingly surpassed traditional media, as a 
   result of which this trend makes big and possibly long-term changes 
   to the contents being exchanged over the Internet [1]. The global 
   Internet video traffic had surpassed global peer-to-peer (P2P) 
   traffic in 2010 [2]. Excluding the amount of video exchanged through 
   P2P file sharing, at the time being, Internet video is 40 percent 
   of consumer Internet traffic. In 2015, it reached 62 percent. 
   If all forms of video are counted, the number will be approximately 
   90 percent by 2015 [2]. 
   To meet the great opportunities and challenges coming along with media 
   revolution, sophisticated technology and better facilities 
   with more powerful capabilities have become the most urgent demands. 

   Cloud computing recently has emerged and advanced rapidly as a 
   promising as well as inevitable technology. Generally it can be 
   seen as the integration of Software as a Service (SaaS), 
   Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a 
   Service (IaaS), and Network as a Service (NaaS) [3], [4], [5]. Cloud 
   computing platform provides highly scalable, manageable and 
   schedulable virtual servers, storage, computing power, virtual 
   networks, and network bandwidth, according to user?s requirement 
   and affordability. So, it can provide solution 
   package for the media revolution, if wisely designed for media cloud 
   and deployed & integrated with the advanced technologies on media 
   processing, transmission, and storage, keeping 
   in view the industrial and commercial trends and models as well. 
   An average user generates content very quickly, until runs out of 
   storage space. Most of the content may be used frequently by the 
   user, which requires to be accessed easily. 
   Media management is among the key aspects of cloud computing, 
   since cloud makes it possible to store, manage, and share large 
   amounts of digital media. 




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Cloud computing is a handy solution for processing content in 
distributed environments. Cloud computing provides 
ubiquitous access to the content, without the hassle of keeping 
large storage and computing devices. Sharing large amount of media 
content is another feature that cloud computing provides. Other than 
social media, traditional cloud computing provides 
additional features of collaboration and editing of content. 
Also, if content is to be shared, downloading individual 
files one by one is not easy. 
Cloud computing caters this issue, since all the content 
can be accessed at once by other parties, with whom the 
content is being shared. 
To meet user's requirements, there comes situations when two or more 
clouds have to interoperate through an intermediary cloud or gateway. 
This scenario is known as Inter-cloud computing or cloud federation.  
Inter-cloud Computing involves transcoding and interoperability 
related issues, which also affect the overall process of multimedia 
content delivery. 
In this draft, we have tried to dig out deep not only on 
Media Cloud, but also on Inter-cloud computing. 
We have presented a detailed architecture, communication 
pattern and protocols, according to different scenarios and 
also highlighted some key issues in this regard.




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2.  Related Work

   Media cloud and inter-cloud computing is still in its start, 
so there is no standard architecture available for data 
communication, media storage, compression, and media delivery. 
Already done studies mainly focus on presenting architectural 
blueprints for this purpose. 
[6] presents an industrial overview of the media cloud. 
The authors state that media cloud is the solution to 
suffice the dramatically increasing trends of media content 
and media consumption. For media content delivery, QoS is 
going to be the main concern. We present details in this 
regard in [7]. 

To reduce delay and jitter of media streaming, better QoS is required, 
for which [8] proposes media-edge cloud (MEC) architecture. 
It proposes usage of P2P for inter and intra MEC communications, for 
the purpose of scalability. The authors present in this article that 
an MEC is a cloudlet which locates at the edge of the cloud. MEC is 
composed of storage space, central processing unit (CPU), and graphics 
processing unit (GPU) clusters. The MEC stores, processes, and 
transmits media content at the edge, thus incurring a 
shorter delay. In turn the media cloud is composed of MECs, which can 
be managed in a centralized or peer-to-peer (P2P) manner.
This architecture presents three major features: (i) MECs at the edge 
of media cloud for the purpose of reducing delay; (ii) P2P technology 
is used in both intra and inter MEC domains, for scalability; 
(iii) proxy, which is located at the edge of an MEC or in the gateway, 
for the purpose of multimedia content caching to compensate for mobile 
devices, since they have limited computational power and 
battery life. Proxy can be adopted to seamlessly integrate media 
cloud, hence addresses heterogeneity problems. 
In [9], authors present an approach to use a pair of proxy, a client proxy 
at the user?s side and a server proxy at the cloud side, to integrate 
the cloud seamlessly to the wireless applications. 
Authors in [10], [11] also present proxy as a bridge, for sharing 
the contents of home cloud to other home clouds and to the outside, 
public media clouds. This proxy can do additional task of indexing 
the multimedia content, allowing public cloud to build search 
database and content classification. 

Media cloud can then provide discovery service to the users to 
search the content of their interest. [12] also presents a proxy 
scheme for transcoding and delivery of media. On the other hand, 
[13] and [14] propose usage of P2P for delivering media stream 
outside the media cloud. In both the cases, it builds a 
hybrid architecture, which includes P2P as well as media cloud.
Transcoding and compression of media content requires 
a lot of resources. 



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[15] and [16] presents an architecture, in which Map-Reduce model is 
applied for this purpose, in private and public clouds. 
[17] has proposed the concept of stream oriented cloud and 
stream-oriented object. The authors introduce stream-oriented cloud 
with a high-level description. In [18], the authors discuss about 
mobile multimedia broadcast over cloud computing. 
[19] discusses about personal rich media information management, 
searching, and sharing.

3.  Media Cloud

   Meeting the consumption requirements of future is a challenge now. 
The extraordinary growth in mobile phone usage, specially with smart 
phones along with 3G, LTE, and LTE Advanced, Multimedia Broadcast and 
Multicast Services (MBMS) networks, and then the availability 
of more convenient access network, like: 
Wi-Fi, WiMAX, Fiber to the home, and broadband networks, has hugely 
increased the production as well as communication of 
multimedia content. It is estimated that by 2015, up to 500 billion 
hours of content will be available for digital distribution. With 
social media, IPTV, Video on Demand, Voice over IP, 
Time Shifted Television (TSTV), Pause Live Television (PLTV), 
Remote Storage Digital Video Recorder (RSDVR), 
Network Personal Video Recorder (nPVR), and other such services 
available more easily, users now demand anytime and on-the-go 
access to content. As estimated, by 2015, there will be 
1 billion mobile video customers and 
15 billion devices will be able to receive content over 
the Internet [6].



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3.1.  Media Cloud Storage

   Since media cloud architecture is not standardized and study 
available is not enough. Some of the existing work uses 
simple storage schemes for multimedia content, while most 
of the works rely on Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) [20]. 
But the issue with HDFS is that it is designed mainly for 
batch processing, rather than for interactive user activities. 
Also, HDFS files are write-once and can have only one writer 
at a time, which makes it very restricted for those 
applications which require real-time processing, before the 
actual delivery of data. 
Other than these issues, dynamic load-balancing cannot be 
done with HDFS, since it does not support data rebalancing schemes. 
Energy consumption is an important issue in media cloud content 
communication, since it requires lot of processing, quality display, 
and playback. [21] discusses about this issue. The forecast, based 
on the power consumption trend, says that by year 2021, the world 
population would require 1175GW power to support media consumption. 
Storage also plays an important role in this regard, because 
efficient storage technique will consumes less energy. 

3.2.  Media Cloud Design Considerations

   Architecting media cloud is among the main concerns right now. 
As it has been discussed that content receiving devices are 
heterogeneous, so a media cloud must have the capability to 
deliver content according to device?s capabilities and via 
multiple pathways. A cloud must be able to deliver content via 
multiple paths, having support for multiple tenants and 
allowing multiple service providers to share the infrastructure 
and software components. 
When there are multiple tenants, their need keeps on changing,
which media cloud should be able to meet. 
Cloud architecture should be able to add or remove virtual 
machines and servers quickly and cost-effectively. Same is 
the case with storage capacity. Low latency transcoding, 
caching, streaming, and delivery of content are 
must for media cloud. Disk I/O subsystem speed is going to 
be crucial in this regard. Using advanced technologies, 
like solid state drives (SSD), serial attached 
SCSI (SAS) interfaces, next-generation processors, etc., 
would become a necessity. Power utilization is another 
vital thing to be considered. Due to huge amount of 
processing and communication of large amount of data, which 
is then received by devices which also include small, 
power constraint nodes, it is going to be very important 
to have an affective power saving mechanism. 



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Since we are talking about media cloud, which involves 
virtual machines (VMs), which would be created during 
run-time to suffice user?s needs and at times, many VM's 
will not be in use, whether temporarily or permanently, 
so they should be monitored and suspended or shutdown, 
when required. This will save a lot of power of the 
datacenter. On the receiver?s side, data received should be 
only what is required and should be in the most appropriate 
format, which suits the receiving node?s requirements 
as well as processing and power utilization 
attributes. For thin client, the device which has to perform 
all these activities, like, broker or access network gateway, 
must ensure presentation conformity of the 
client node. Security and protection is going to be another 
issue [22] [23] [25]. Data, receiver, and VM security 
would become difficult to manage, though very important. 
In a virtual networking and multitenant environment, VM 
isolation and isolation of clients becomes very important. 
Similarly for data, it is not only required to store the 
data protectively and securely, but also to be transmitted 
through secure session. So, both kinds of security, storage 
security and communication security are required. 

Current state-of-the-art devices can produce, store and deliver 
high quality media content, that can be further shared on social 
media and other media forums. Since, different types of 
digital media contents can be produced and disseminated across 
different networks, so a standard mechanism is required to allow 
interoperability between clouds and transcoding of 
media contents [11]. Purpose of media cloud is to address this 
problem and to allow users constitute a cloud and manage media 
content transparently, even if it is located outside the 
user's domain. Different device types, resolutions, and 
qualities require generating different versions of the 
same content. This makes transcoding one of the most 
critical tasks to be conducted, when media traverses networks. 
This requires a lot of media processing that is 
computationally expensive. 

Media cloud helps fulfilling four major goals: ubiquitous access; 
content classification; sharing large amount of media; content 
discovery service. Since media content is produced big time and 
very rapidly, it also requires efficient access, other than being 
ubiquitously accessed. Media cloud provides indexing and proper 
classification of content, which makes access of content easier 
as well as makes searching efficient. Media cloud also provide 
content discovery service, with which, content stored on other 
clouds can be accessed, after searching and negotiating licensing 
terms and conditions. This creates accessibility of huge amount 
of multimedia content and creates cloud of clouds (CoC) that 
can interoperate with each other.







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4.  Media Cloud Architecture

   Architecting media cloud and its standardization is becoming very 
important now. Media content is increasing big time and with 
cloud computing, the online resource utilization is becoming 
ubiquitous. Users do not tend to keep data with them anymore. 
Other than the conventional things media cloud has to do, as 
compared to standard cloud computing, media cloud has to handle 
different types of multimedia content as well. Handling 
multimedia does not only mean transcoding of different media 
contents into interoperable form, but also to be able to 
communicate multimedia according to the quality and type of 
content the user wants. Storage of multimedia content plays a 
very vital role in this regard. Storage 
technology has to be standardized to ensure efficiency of 
coding-decoding and storage space. 
In a study we conducted on media cloud storage, it was observed 
that different cloud storage services use different storage 
schemes, which affect the size of data, its presentation, 
and quality. For bulk data, this heterogeneity of storage 
technologies matters a lot, since they are going to put more 
impact, when there is cloud federation taking place. 

Media cloud tasks are divided into layers, to make it more 
comprehensive that what kinds of things media cloud has to do 
and to what extent. Figure 1 presents an overall layered 
architecture of media cloud. In figure 1, 
at virtualization layer, cloud has to deal with computing 
virtualization, memory virtualization, and network virtualization. 

Storage layer deals with storage space virtualization and 
storage technology to be used for media content storage, 
like Network Attached Storage (NAS), Direct Attached Storage (DAS), 
Fiber Channel (FC), Fiber Channel over IP (FCIP), 
Internet Fiber Channel Protocol (iFCP), 
Content Addressed Storage (CAS) or Fixed Content Storage (FCS), 
and Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI). 
It also has to deal with data security, privacy, and integrity. 
Other than this, data replication, de-duplication, and other added 
features are also part of this layer. 
Data replication is for the overall protection of stored 
contents, to make sure that if one copy of data is lost or 
corrupted, its replica exists. On the other hand, 
data de-duplication is for the user, which protects making 
unnecessary copies of the same content. Its purpose is to increase 
storage efficiency. 
Next is the Access Layer, which has to deal with network access, 
whether the access network or wide area network. It also has to 
ensure secure communication of the data. 

Middleware layer is to deal with encoding/decoding tasks and 
interoperability related things. As discussed, heterogeneous 
clients, having heterogeneous requirements, access heterogeneous 
types and formats of data, so transcoding 
and interoperability is perhaps the most important part in media 
delivery. That is why this layer is very crucial. Section V discusses 
on it in more detail. 
Application layer provides the user interface (UI). UI can be 
in two forms, a web interface or a client application, running 
on the user?s machine. Media cloud provider, or cloud service provider 
has a business in all these services that it provides to its customers. 
Business layer deals with that part of media cloud architecture. 
The services will have different types for different customers 
and accessing devices. 
Quality and quantity of data is also considered when offering services. 
Different kinds of packages can be made available to the user.






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5.  Media Cloud Inter-Cloud Computing Architecture

   Communication of two or more clouds with each other is known as 
Inter-cloud computing. When there are many clouds existing with 
multimedia content, clouds should be able to communicate with 
each other, creating inter-cloud computing scenario. This is 
also important to meet the increasing demands, as diverse type 
of requirements can be made by the user, which may not be offered 
by one single cloud. To meet the requirement, one cloud has to 
request another cloud or multiple clouds. Other than this, cloud 
should be able to discover services available elsewhere. 


This inter-cloud computing will create a Cloud of Clouds (CoC), 
being able to communicate the data that is not stored by its 
datacenters directly. For this, cloud interoperability must be 
in a standardized way. Standardized way of 
service level agreement (SLA) must be made part of it. 
Inter-cloud Protocol, with the support of 1-to-1, 
1-to-many, and many-to-many cloud to cloud communication 
and messaging must exist. Some of the basics are presented in [24]. 
To start with, first the entities are to be defined.



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5.1.  Inter-Cloud Entities

   Four entities are involved in Inter-cloud communication, as given below. 

5.1.1.  Cloud Service Provider

Cloud Service Provider provides network connectivity, cloud services, 
and network management services to the Cloud Service Customer, 
Cloud Service Partner, and other Cloud Service Providers. 
Provider may be operating from within the data center, outside, or both. 
Cloud Service Provider has the roles of: cloud service administrator, 
cloud service manager, business manager, and security & risk manager. 
They are further discussed below.
Cloud service administrator has the responsibility of performing all 
operational processes and procedures of the cloud service provider, 
making it sure that services and associated infrastructure meets 
the operational targets. 

Cloud service manger ensures that services are available to the 
customers for usage. It also ensures that service function correctly 
and adhere to the service level agreement. It also makes sure that 
provider's business support system and operational support system 
work smoothly. 
Business manager is responsible for business related matters of 
the services being offered. Creating and then keeping track of 
business plans, making service offering strategies, and maintaining 
relationship with the customers are also among the jobs business 
manager performs. 
Security & risk manger makes it sure that the provider manages 
the risks appropriately, which are associated with deployment, 
delivery, and use of the services being offered. It includes 
ensuring the adherence of security policies to the 
service level agreement. 

The sub-roles of cloud service provider include: inter-cloud 
provider, deployment manager, 
customer support & care representative.

Inter-cloud provider relies on more than one cloud service 
providers to provide services to the customers. Inter-cloud 
provider allows customers to access data residing in external 
cloud service providers by aggregating, 
federating, and intermediating services of multiple 
cloud service providers and adding a layer of technical 
functionality that provides consistent interface and addresses 
interoperability issues. Inter-cloud provider 
can be combined with business services or independent of this. 
Deployment manager performs deployment of service into production. 
It defines operational environment for the services, 
initial steps, and requirements for the deployment and proper 
working of the services. It also gathers the metrics and ensures 
that services meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs). 




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Customer support & care representative is the main interface between 
customers and provider. Its purpose is to address customer's queries 
and issues. Customer support & care representative monitors customer's 
requests and performs the required initial problem analysis.

5.1.2.  Cloud Service Customer

Cloud Service Customer in that entity which uses cloud services and has
 a business relationship with the Cloud Service Provider. The roles of 
Cloud Service Customer are: cloud service user, customer cloud service 
administrator, customer business manager, and customer 
cloud service integrator. 
Cloud service user only uses cloud service(s), according to the needs. 
Customer cloud service administrator ensures that the usage of 
cloud services goes smoothly. It oversees the administrative tasks and 
operational processes, related to the use of services and communication 
between the customer and the provider. 
Cloud business manager has a role of meeting business goals of customer, 
by using cloud services in a cost effective way. It takes into account 
the financial and legal aspects of the use of services, including 
accountability, approval, and ownership. It creates a business plan and 
then keeps track of it. It then selects service(s), according to the plan 
and then purchases it. It also requests audit reports from the Auditor, 
an independent third party. 

Customer cloud service integrator integrates the cloud services with 
customers internal, non-cloud based services. For smooth operations and 
efficient working, Integrator has a very vital role to play. Services? 
interoperability and compatibility are the main concerns in this task.

5.1.3.  Cloud Service Partner

Cloud service partner is kind of a third party which provides auxiliary 
roles, which are beyond the scope of cloud service provider and 
cloud service customer. Cloud service partner has the roles of 
Cloud Developer, Auditor, and Cloud Broker. 
In a broad sense, Cloud Developer develops services for other entities, 
like Cloud Service Customer and Cloud Service Provider. 
Among the roles, Cloud Developer performs the tasks of designing, 
developing, testing, and maintaining the cloud service.  
Among the sub-roles, Cloud Developer performs as Service Integrator 
and Service Component Developer. As Service Integrator, Cloud Developer 
deals with composition of service from other services. 
While as a Service Component Developer, it deals with design, 
development, testing, and maintenance of individual components 
of service. Cloud Developer ensures meeting the standard of 
development, based on certain user or general users, according to 
the needs of the project. 



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Since, Inter-cloud computing is going to be standardized, it 
should be mentioned in case of Cloud Service Developer, that the services 
being developed, must meet the standard. 
Since heterogeneous clients (devices) are going to use the services 
and on the other hand, various diverse types of development environments 
are available to the developer, so it must be tightly coupled with 
some specific standard of development.
Since service provider and service customer are separate entities, 
so the service quality, usage behavior, and conformance to 
service level agreement, all this has to be audited by the 
third party, having the role of Auditor. 
Cloud Auditor performs the audit of the provision and use of 
cloud services. Audit covers operations, performance, security, 
and examines whether a specific criteria of service level agreement 
and the audit is met or not. Auditor can be a software system 
or an organization.
Cloud Broker offers business and relationship services to 
Cloud Service Customers to evaluate and select 
Cloud Service Providers, according to their needs. 
Negotiating between provider and customer is 
among the main roles of Cloud Broker. With Inter-cloud or 
Cloud of Clouds communication, it will be very important for 
Cloud Broker to perform inter-cloud interoperability, instead of 
having another node for this purpose. The basic activities a 
Cloud Broker performs are that it acquires and assesses customers, 
assesses marketplace, performs negotiation and setting 
up service level agreements, getting information from 
cloud service providers on services and resources, receive and 
response to requests from cloud service customers, evaluate 
the service requests and select appropriate service(s) for 
customer and complete the requests. Assessment of marketplace 
can also be done prior to customer acquisition, when 
Cloud Broker provisions the customers to select a 
service or provider, from a given set of catalogue. 
In any case, Cloud Broker plays its role only during the 
contracting phase between customer and provider, not during 
the consumption of services. For negotiation between customer 
and provider, while assessing both of them, it is important 
to assess interoperability issues, because they directly impact 
the transcoding process and eventually affect the overall 
processing delay. SLA negotiation has to be done in prior, 
because the services are provided on the basis of agreed SLAs. 
Explicit negotiation makes it easy for customer 
to decide whether to avail a particular service or not.




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5.1.4.  Cloud Service Carrier

Cloud carrier is an intermediary that provides connectivity 
and transport of cloud services, from cloud providers to 
cloud customers. With the role of Cloud network provider it 
provides network connectivity and related services. 
It may operate within the date center, outside of it, or both. 
It provides network connectivity, provides other network 
related services, and manages the services. 


5.2.  Inter-Cloud Topology Elements

Inter-cloud computing involves three basic entities, 
which are explained in this part of the article. 

5.2.1.  Inter-Cloud Exchanges

Inter-cloud Exchanges (ICXs) are those entities which 
are capable of introducing attributes of cloud environment
for inter-cloud computing. It is a complex and variable system 
of service providers and the users of 
services. It involves applications, platform, and services 
needed to be accessible through uniform interfaces. 
Brokering tools play an important part in actively 
balancing the demands and offerings, to guarantee the 
required SLA at higher levels of service. 
Cloud Service Providers exchange resources among each other 
effectively pooling together part of their infrastructure. 
ICXs perform aggregation of offer and demand of 
computing resources, creating an opportunity for 
brokering services. In ICXs, proxy mechanisms are 
required to handle active sessions, when migration is 
to be performed. This is done by Redirecting Proxy 
in Inter-Cloud Exchange. Redirecting Proxy performs 
public IP to private IP mapping. This public IP to 
private IP mapping is important to provide transparent addressing.

5.2.2.  Inter-Cloud Root

Inter-cloud Root contains services like, Naming Authority, 
Directory Services, Trust Authority, etc. it is 
physically not a single entity, but a DNS-like global 
replicating and hierarchical system. It may also act 
as broker.

5.2.3.  Inter-Cloud Gateway

It is a router that implements Inter-cloud protocols and 
allows Inter-cloud interoperability. It provides mechanism 
for supporting the entire profile of Inter-cloud protocols 
and standards. Once the initial negotiation is 
done, each cloud collaborates with each other directly. 
The purpose of Inter-Cloud Gateway is providing mechanism 
for supporting the entire profile of Inter-Cloud 
standards and protocols. On the other hand, the 
Inter-Cloud Root and Inter-Cloud Exchanges mediate and 
facilitate the initial Inter-Cloud negotiation process 
among Clouds.



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5.3.  Inter-Cloud Scenarios

Communication between cloud service customer and 
cloud service provider(s) can take place in two ways: 
(a). with broker and (b). without broker. The cloud broker 
is an intermediary that negotiates between the 
cloud service customer and one or more cloud providers by 
providing attractive value-added services to users on top 
of various cloud service providers. A cloud broker provides 
a single interface through which multiple clouds can be 
managed and share resources. Cloud broker operates 
outside of the clouds and controls and monitors those clouds. 
The main purpose of the broker is assisting the customer 
to find the best provider and the service, according to 
customer's needs, with respect to specified SLA and providing 
him with a uniform interface to manage and observe the 
deployed services. 

A broker earns its profit by fulfilling requirements of both 
the parties. Cloud broker uses a variety of methods, 
such as a repository for data sharing and integration across 
data sharing services [26] to develop a commendable 
service environment and achieve the best possible deal and 
service level agreement between two parties 
(i.e., Cloud Service Provider and Cloud Service Customer). 
Broker typically makes a profit either by taking remuneration 
from the completed deal or by varying the broker's spread, 
or some combination of both. The spread is the difference 
between the price at which a broker buys from seller (provider) 
and the price at which it sells to the buyer (customer). 
To handle commercial services, Broker has a 
cost management system. 

Cloud Broker includes applicationprogramming interfaces (APIs) 
and a standard abstract API, which is used to manage cloud 
resources from different cloud providers. Cloud Broker holds 
another abstract API for the negotiation of cloud service 
facilities with the customer. This access of services can be 
direct, between cloud service customer and 
cloud service provider(s). In that case, the interoperability 
and transcoding related things are handled by the customer itself.




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5.4.  Media Cloud Inter-Cloud Computing Protocols

The generic Inter-cloud computing architecture has a 
Cloud Service Customer, one or more Cloud Service Provider(s), 
and an Inter-cloud Provider.
For different types of communications, different Inter-cloud 
protocols are used [27] [28]. According to their type and 
extent of use, they are discussed here.

5.4.1.  Basic communication

"Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) 
[29][30] for basic communication, transport, and using 
Semantic Web [31] techniques such as 
Resource Description Framework (RDF) [32] to specify resources."[27]. 
XMPP is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) based communications 
protocol, for message-oriented middleware. 
XMPP is for near real-time instant messaging (IM), 
presence information, and contact list maintenance. 
As it is 'extensible', it has also been used for 
VoIP signaling, gaming, videos, file transfer, 
publish-subscribe systems, and Internet of Things applications, 
such as the smart grid, and social networking services. 
Resource Description Format (RDF) is a metadata data model, 
which is used as a general method for conceptual description 
or modeling of information, implemented in web resources, 
using various syntax notations and data serialization formats.

5.4.2.  Services framework

On top of the base XMPP, one of its extensions, XEP 0244, 
provides a services framework for M2M communications, 
named IO Data. XEP-0244 is designed for sending messages from 
one computer to another, providing a transport 
for remote service invocation. It also overcomes the problems 
with SOAP and REST.

5.4.3.  Authentication and encryption

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is used for communication 
security over the Internet. Simple Authentication and 
Security Layer (SASL) is used for authentication purpose. 
Streams are first secured with TLS, before 
completing the authentication through SASL. SASL 
authenticates a stream by means of an XMPP-specific 
profile of the protocol. SASL adds authentication support 
in a generalized way to connection-based protocols. 
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) provides 
authentication services for cloud federation scenario, 
but it is still not fully supported in XMPP-specific profiles.


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5.4.4.  Identity and access management

SAML is particularly used for authentication and 
authorization between identity provider and service provider. 
A significance SAML has in this regard is web browser 
single sign-on (SSO) mechanism. SSO provides access control 
of multiple independent, but related software systems. 
Its counter action is single sign-off, which disallows 
access to multiple services with one action at 
once, hence saving time and effort. eXtensible 
Access Control Markup Language (XACML) is also used 
for access control. It evaluates access requests 
according to the rules already defined in policies. 
XACML is more useful in inter-cloud scenarios, 
where it provides common terminology and interoperability 
between access control implementations by multiple 
service providers or vendors. XACML is an 
Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC), in which rights 
are granted to the users on the basis of 
attributes (user attributes, resource attributes, etc.) 
associated with the user. For larger enterprises, 
XACML can also be implemented with 
Role Based Access Control (RBAC), which restricts systems 
access to the authorized users.

5.4.5.  Exchange services directory

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is used for 
resource allocation, such as, storage and processing, 
in inter-cloud environment, while SPARQL Protocol 
and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) is a query/matching 
service for RDF. 
SPARQL can retrieve and manipulate data in RDF format. 
When a request is made, it invokes a SPARQL query 
over an XMPP connection to the Inter-cloud Root, to 
apply the constraints and preferences to the 
computing semantics catalog, where it is determined 
whether the service description on another cloud are 
according to the requirements of the first cloud.

5.4.6.  Media related communication

H.264/MPEG4 (Motion Picture Experts Group) or also 
known as Advanced Video Coding (AVC), is one the most 
commonly used coding scheme for high quality 
video recording, compression, and distribution. 
Because of its Block Motion Compensation (BMC) feature, 
it is also the most widely used encoding scheme by 
Internet streaming video services, like, YouTube, Vimeo, 
iTunes, etc., and also in web-based softwares, like, 
Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight. 



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HDTV broadcasts over terrestrials and satellite also 
use H.264/MPEG4. With Block Motion Compensation, frames 
are divided into blocks of pixels and then each block 
is predicted from the previous blocks, making transmission 
more efficient. H.264 supports both lossy and loss-less 
compressions, so it is suited for Internet streaming 
services, in which, streaming quality can be dynamically 
decided based on the condition of the network or user's link. 
Adobe Flash, a platform for rich Internet applications (RIA), 
also uses H.264. Flash is most widely used for embedding 
multimedia contents into webpages. Most of the interactive 
multimedia content, videos, and advertisements are made 
in Adobe Flash. 
For the delivery of streamed media, 
Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is used. 
RTSP is responsible for establishing and maintaining 
sessions between two endpoints, while streaming of 
content is performed by Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) 
along with Real Time Control Protocol (RTCP), which is 
responsible for providing statistics and control 
information to RTP flows. 


6.  Major Issues in Interoperability

As an emerging technology, media cloud is competing with 
the existing media technologies and systems and it has 
to deal with a lot of challenges, to evolve smoothly and 
effectively. Interoperability is the key challenge 
faced by media cloud. Due to various heterogeneities, 
as discussed below, interoperability becomes the key issue.

6.1.  Heterogeneous media contents and media transcoding

Very diverse types of services are available in the 
media cloud arena, making transcoding and content 
presentation an area of concern. Services like, 
Video on Demand (VoD), IPTV, Voice over IP (VoIP), 
Time Shifted Television (TSTV), Pause Live Television (PLTV), 
Remote Storage Digital Video Recorder (RSDVR), 
Network Personal Video Recorder (nPVR), and the increasing 
social media content require a 
lot of effort in this regard.




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6.2.  Heterogeneous media storage technologies

Storage is an important part. Multimedia content require a lot of 
space. Also, in case of multimedia contents, it becomes more 
difficult to search on the basis of actual contents the file contains. 
Efficiency in storage and searching is an important aspect 
media cloud should have. Different storage technologies available are 
Network Attached Storage (NAS), Direct Attached Storage (DAS), 
Fiber Channel (FC), Fiber Channel over IP (FCIP), Internet 
Fiber Channel Protocol (iFCP), Content Addressed Storage (CAS) or 
Fixed Content Storage (FCS), and Internet 
Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI). Communication between 
clouds creates inefficiency when different storage technologies 
are provided by the service providers.

6.3.  Heterogeneous access networks

Every access network, like, broadband, WiFi, WiBro, GPRS, 2G, 
3G, 4G, LTE, LTE Advanced, and other upcoming standards have 
different attributes, bandwidth, jitter tolerance, and performance.

6.4.  Heterogeneous client devices

When contents are available on cloud, or media cloud, to be 
more specific, then any device that has access to the Internet 
can request for service. All types of client nodes have 
different capabilities and constraints. Other than the type of 
contents it can support, the size of display, buffer memory, 
power consumption, processing speed, and other such attributes 
have to be considered before fulfilling the request.

6.5.  Heterogeneous applications

Requesting applications are also of different types and 
require different treatment. Other than the heterogeneity 
of device, the application type also matters. For example, 
web browser requesting service will have different requirements, 
while cloud client application will have different requirements 
for the same service.

6.6.  Heterogeneous QoS requirements and QoS provisioning mechanisms

Depending upon the access network, condition of core network, 
the requesting device, user?s needs, and type of service, 
heterogeneous QoS requirements can be made. Dynamic QoS 
provisioning schemes needs to be implemented 
in this regard. We have worked on it in detail in our 
study presented in [7].



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6.7.  Data/media sanitization

When a client requests for storage space from the cloud, 
it does not mean that any type of data can be now stored. 
Data has to be filtered. Some of the cloud storage service 
providers do not allow some specific type of data 
to be stored, like pornographic material. One of such 
services is Microsoft SkyDrive.

6.8.  Security and trust model

Outsourced data poses new security risks in terms of 
correctness and privacy of the data in cloud. When we 
talk about media cloud, not only data service will be request 
by the user, but also, storage service would 
also be requested. Storing contents, which may have 
some sensitive or private information, poses risks to the customers. 
Some of the details are presented in our 
work in [5].

6.9.  Heterogeneous Internet Protocols

IPv4 address space has exhausted. Migration towards IPv6 
has formally been expedited. Both of these versions of IP 
are not directly interoperable. Since this migration is going 
to take some time, may be a decade [33], so it 
creates an overhead by them operate with each other. 
Tunneling is the viable solution in hand, but has its own overhead. 
We have worked extensively on this and presented 
our findings in [33].
Other than the existing heterogeneities and the ones that are 
to be emerged, media cloud needs to be able to deal with 
dramatically increasing video contents. Until 2015, in every 
second, 1 million minutes of video content will 
cross the network [2]. Therefore, it is very important to 
carefully design the architecture of media cloud, to be a 
successful media cloud platform and to be able to adapt to 
continuously increasing amount of media content, new 
applications, and services.







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7.  References

   [1] Mingfeng Tan, Xiao Su, "Media Cloud: When Media Revolution 
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[2] Cisco-White-Paper, "Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast 
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[3] M. Armbrust, A. Fox, R. Griffith, A. D. Joseph, 
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[4] W. Lizhe, T. Jie, M. Kunze, A. C. Castellanos, D. Kramer, 
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[5] Mohammad Aazam, Pham Phuoc Hung, Eui-Nam Huh, 
"Cloud of Things: Integrating Internet of Things with 
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[6] "Moving to the Media Cloud", Viewpoint paper, Intel-HP, November 2010.

[7] Mohammad Aazam, Adeel M. Syed, Eui-Nam Huh, "Redefining Flow Label 
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for Thin Client", in the proceedings of 19th IEEE Asia Pacific 
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[8] Z. Wenwu, L. Chong, W. Jianfeng, and L. Shipeng, "Multimedia 
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[9] S. Ferretti, V. Ghini, F. Panzieri, and E. Turrini, 
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"Media Cloud: Sharing contents in the large," in Consumer 
Electronics (ICCE), 2011 IEEE International Conference on, 
2011, pp. 227-228.


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[11] Daniel Diaz-Sanchez, Florina Almenarez, Andres Marin, 
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[14] I. Trajkovska, J. S. Rodriguez, and A. M. Velasco, 
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[15] R. Pereira, M. Azambuja, K. Breitman, and M. Endler, 
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[16] R. Pereira and K. Breitman, "A Cloud Based Architecture for 
Improving Video Compression Time Efficiency: The Split & Merge 
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[17] J. Feng, P. Wen, J. Liu, and H. Li, "Elastic stream cloud (ESC): 
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[18] L. Li, L. Xiong, Y. Sun, and W. Liu, "Research on Mobile 
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[19] J. Shen, S. Yan, and X.-S. Hua, "The e-recall environment for 
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[20] D. Borthakur. (2010). Hadoop Distributed File System design. 
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[21] C. Preist and P. Shabajee, "Energy Use in the Media Cloud: Behaviour 
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[22] Wang, Cong, et al. "Toward secure and dependable storage 
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[23] Wang, Cong, et al. "Privacy-preserving public auditing for 
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[24] Fang Liu, Jin Tong, Jian Mao, Robert Bohn, John Messina, 
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[25] Yongdong Wu, Vivy Suhendra, Huaqun Guo, 
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[26] Yau, Stephen S., and Yin Yin. "A privacy preserving 
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[27] David Bernstein, Deepak Vij, "Intercloud Directory and 
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[28] Lloret, Jaime, et al. "Architecture and Protocol for 
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[29] Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): 
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[30] XMPP Standards Foundation at http://xmpp.org/

[31] W3C Semantic Web Activity, at: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

[32] Resource Description Framework (RDF), at: http://www.w3.org/RDF/

[33] Mohammad Aazam, Eui-Nam Huh, "Impact of IPv4-IPv6 
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Annals of Telecommunications, vol. 68, August 2013





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Appendix A.  Acknowledgements

   This draft is supported by the IT R&D program of MKE/KEIT. 
[10041891, Development on Community Broadcast Technology based 
on MaaS (Media as a Service) providing Smart Convergence Service].

Authors' Addresses

Mohammad Aazam
Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
Computer Engineering Department, Kyung Hee University 
Yongin, South Korea
	
Phone: +1 613 617 8481
Email: aazam@ieee.org

Eui-Nam Huh 
Computer Engineering Department, Kyung Hee University 
Yongin, South Korea
	
Phone: +82 (0)10 45 51 94 18
Email: johnhuh@khu.ac.kr

SooWong Kim 
Alticast, Seoul, South Korea
	
Phone: +82 (0) 2-2007-7807
Email: swkim@alticast.com