With online video-conference and video-game usage skyrocketing during the COVID-19 pandemic, real-time communication has entered into a new era of extreme scale. Hyperscale public clouds are ideally positioned to absorb such global demand shocks; unfortunately, the real-time service provider infrastructure has not been designed with cloud-readiness in mind. This leads to operators and vendors pursuing piecemeal cloud transformation strategies, causing daunting operational complexities and scalability barriers. In this paper we present a blueprint for the cloud transformation of real-time communications: we recast the Voice over IP (VoIP) infrastructure over a service mesh. In this design, the service mesh provides programmable multi-protocol load balancing, resiliency, security and monitoring at the transport-layer (L4) and the application-layer (L7), on top of which the existing VoIP codebase can be deployed unchanged. To overcome the performance degradation caused by rich user-space L4/L7 packet processing, we propose a proxy ooad engine to push media trac processing into the OS kernel. Evaluations on a fully functional VoIP testbed give experimental evidence that our real-time service mesh reliably delivers the expected automatic scale-in/scale-out features: we report 13x raw packet rate improvement over the state-of-the-art service mesh proxy and orders of magnitude faster VoIP failover compared to industry best practice.
Lévai Tamás, Rétvári Gábor, Szögi Péter, Vass Balázs, Vida Rolland, Réthelyi Bálint, Bíró József
2023-04-24
Támogató: Ericsson