Network Services Management using Programmable Data Planes for Visual Cloud Computing

Visual Cloud Computing (VCC) applications provide highly efficient solutions in video data processing pipelines on edge/cloud infrastructures. These applications and their infrastructures demand end-to-end monitoring and fine-grained application traffic control to meet user quality of experience requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel network services management methodology for VCC applications by leveraging the advantages of programmable data planes enabled by Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4). Specifically, we define a custom fixed-length application header and use it to improve the performance of a video streaming application through congestion avoidance using Multi-Hop Route Inspection (MRI), a variant of In-band Network Telemetry (INT), and switch port forwarding (tunneling) capabilities. For evaluation experiments, we use P4 per-packet telemetry metadata for routing paths, ingress/egress timestamps, queue occupancy in a given node, and egress port link utilization in a VCC testbed on the NSF-supported FABRIC infrastructure. Our experiment results demonstrate performance improvement obtained with our methodology in terms of both packet loss and throughput metrics.