NUBOMEDIA: An elastic PaaS enabling the convergence of real-time and big data multimedia

The increasing acceptance of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN) paradigms is enabling the creation of cloud technologies combining Real-Time multimedia Communications (RTC) and multimedia processing for big data. Although many vendors already provide solutions in these areas, none of them comprises a single platform for end-to-end service provisioning and deployment addressing all the complexities of combining RTC and media processing. As a result, developing such types of applications is still extremely complex. Following this, we present NUBOMEDIA, an open-source platform enabling developers to create and deploy RTC applications with advanced media processing capabilities. For this, NUBOMEDIA introduces the concept of Media Pipeline: chains of interconnected media processing elements. At deployment time, NUBOMEDIA follows a Platform as a Service (PaaS) scheme, which abstracts for developers most of the complex infrastructure-related tasks such as: provisioning, scaling or QoS and network management. In this paper we present the NUBOMEDIA architecture, which bases on ETSI NFV recommendations, and introduce the main interfaces and capabilities it exposes to developers. To conclude, we present some early experiments demonstrating, through benchmarks, the suitability of the platform to combine RTC and advanced media processing algorithms maintaining the stringent QoS requirements of RTC.