The goal of this project is to build a distributed experimentation infrastructure spanning multiple sites in the US and Europe that is uniquely positioned to facilitate experimental research on global scale mobile services. The infrastructure would consist of cameras and touch-screen displays at different locations in New York and Madison as well as in CERTH and IBBT In Europe, allowing wireless based connectivity for its users through a layer 2 tunnel.
This project will enable research in distributed mobile services at a global scale. The research questions revolve around tradeoffs in placing computation across diverse locations around the globe and how they should be best replicated to optimize between performance latencies, bandwidth consumed and operational costs of such a service. The PIs are considering an application that they call a distributed wall where each site has a number or sensors and actuators, i.e. motion-detecting cameras and displays. A core local computational task is to quickly detect individuals and focus the cameras on them. As the number of sites grows, a key challenge for the application developers is to determine how and when to provision servers in different parts of the globe to optimize on the key experimental metrics. The proposed outcomes include better understanding of distributed deployment of global scale mobile services.
The project also has significant educational impact. The PIs will incorporate learnings from the project into the classroom through various networking and wireless communication courses at the respective universities. In addition, this project will bring students together from several countries to work together on a single project. The students will travel to the remote locations to give them exposure to research in different institutions across different countries with different research cultures and approaches to addressing networking research.
The primary goal of this project has been to demonstrate how to testbeds that are located across different sites in the world and use them simultaneously for larger-scale multi-site experiments. The scope of this project was to achieve this goal using infrastructure available in the US, via the GENI testbed and that in Europe via the FIRE project. The process for allowing an experimenter to access resources from multiple such testbeds is called federation and this project demonstrated one example of successful federation of such testbeds. To demonstrate how this federation can be accomplished, the research team setup an experiment that performs video transcoding on the fly --- a video is being streamed from testbed servers in Greece (FIRE) and the stream is being transcoded using a compute rack located in the US (GENI). The transcoding process converts the video from a high resolution to a lower one based on the available network and channel capacity on the end-to-end Internet path. This allows for improved user experience in watching the video. Demonstrations of the technology and the experiment was showcased in multiple events, especially in GENI Engineering Conferences over the last two years. In each of these demonstrations the experiment was operated live from streaming servers in Europe and viewed with real-time transcoding via GENI resources in the US. A public demonstration is available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMtQB_p1S6c
