Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11649 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866915198624858112 |
|---|---|
| author | Michel, Oliver Sengupta, Satadal Kim, Hyojoon Netravali, Ravi Rexford, Jennifer |
| author_facet | Michel, Oliver Sengupta, Satadal Kim, Hyojoon Netravali, Ravi Rexford, Jennifer |
| contents | Video-conferencing applications face an unwavering surge in traffic, stressing their underlying infrastructure in unprecedented ways. This paper rethinks the key building block for conferencing infrastructures -- selective forwarding units (SFUs). SFUs relay and adapt media streams between participants and, today, run in software on general-purpose servers. Our main insight, discerned from dissecting the operation of production SFU servers, is that SFUs largely mimic traditional packet-processing operations such as dropping and forwarding. Guided by this, we present Scallop, an SDN-inspired SFU that decouples video-conferencing applications into a hardware-based data plane for latency-sensitive and frequent media operations, and a software control plane for the (infrequent) remaining tasks, such as analyzing feedback signals. Our Tofino-based implementation fully supports WebRTC and delivers 7-210 times improved scaling over a 32-core commodity server, while reaping performance improvements by cutting forwarding-induced latency by 26 times. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11649 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Scalable Video Conferencing Using SDN Principles Michel, Oliver Sengupta, Satadal Kim, Hyojoon Netravali, Ravi Rexford, Jennifer Networking and Internet Architecture Video-conferencing applications face an unwavering surge in traffic, stressing their underlying infrastructure in unprecedented ways. This paper rethinks the key building block for conferencing infrastructures -- selective forwarding units (SFUs). SFUs relay and adapt media streams between participants and, today, run in software on general-purpose servers. Our main insight, discerned from dissecting the operation of production SFU servers, is that SFUs largely mimic traditional packet-processing operations such as dropping and forwarding. Guided by this, we present Scallop, an SDN-inspired SFU that decouples video-conferencing applications into a hardware-based data plane for latency-sensitive and frequent media operations, and a software control plane for the (infrequent) remaining tasks, such as analyzing feedback signals. Our Tofino-based implementation fully supports WebRTC and delivers 7-210 times improved scaling over a 32-core commodity server, while reaping performance improvements by cutting forwarding-induced latency by 26 times. |
| title | Scalable Video Conferencing Using SDN Principles |
| topic | Networking and Internet Architecture |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11649 |