Prosuming Live Multimedia Content at the Edge

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a localized crowd-sourced multimedia production and distribution system to enable today’s mobile producers of multimedia content to serve their content in real-time to other nearby users, while at the same time drastically reducing the bandwidth as compared to traditional crowd-sourced multimedia services. To achieve this, we created a modular system for many-to-many live production and distribution and deployed it within the media delivery platform developed in the FLAME project. The FLAME platform provides distributed edge computing as well as a programmable network infrastructure. We have performed a first trial of our system in the instance of the FLAME platform deployed in Bristol. Our trial revealed that with our setup 93% bandwidth can be saved, and the latency can be kept as low as 3s. The user evaluation further indicated that a sufficient amount of users (45%) enjoys producing content, an important prerequisite for prosuming apps to thrive.