A Novel and Optimal approach for Multimedia Cloud Storage and Delivery to reduce Total Cost of Ownership

Abstract

In this era of digital communication, and explosion of social media, users generate and share a lot of information most of which is audio visual content. This kind of multimedia content requires good amount of storage in the local device space as well at the network space. In the available parlance of multimedia cloud storage, when the content is streamed from the content server, the bit-stream is typically adapted depending on the available network bandwidth between the client and server session, for example by using Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technique. However, in case when the content is downloaded at the client for offline viewing, with say a resolution ‘Low-Res-1’, the multimedia clouds, do not offer additional mechanism to upgrade to a new resolution say ‘High-Res-2’, without downloading a new file version all over again. In this paper, we propose “MediaStratify” as a novel and optimal approach built on top of SVC to give a scalable solution for storing, sharing and upgrading the multimedia content for viewing offline. Based on the proposal, multimedia content will be stored as layers or ‘stratified’ and distributed over the cloud infrastructure. Through the devised protocol, the end node fetches the partial offsets (spatial, temporal or quality) and upgrades the files through reconstruction. Enterprise applications can utilize the scheme by installing the proposed novel combiner over the file transfer service, the solution can save network bandwidth and power consumption. The most important contribution is to bring down the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for any multimedia cloud or data center by reducing storage requirements by 50 ~ 74% over classical methods, yet achieve the goals of media hosting.