VIRTUOSE – Virtualized Video Services

by

 

VIRTUOSE – Virtualized Video Services

Financial contract Nr. 95 from 03/11/2017

Project ID: C2015_2-4

Deposit code: PN-III-P3-3.5-EUK-2017-02-0023

The total value of the budget:  2.085.600,00  Lei

The total value of the contract:  3.053.700,00 Lei

The total value of the co-founding: 968.100,00 Lei

The start date of the contract: 03/11/2017

The end date of the contract:  31/10/2020

Coordinator: Nokia SP

Partners: 

  • VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd.
  • Sofia Digital Ltd.
  • Teleste Corporation
  • TUT-Tampere University of Technology
  • Tuxera
  • VideoVisit
  • Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Heinrich Hertz Institut (HHI)
  • Siemens AG
  • DResearch
  • Fraunhofer FOKUS
  • Daimler Center for Automotive IT Innovations/TU Berlin
  • BEIA Consult International S.R.L
  • I2CAT
  • Innovati Networks SL
  • Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
  • Koc University
  • NETAS Telecommunications A.S.
  • Vestel Electronics

Project Director (coordinator): Jose Javier Garcia Aranda

Project responsible Romania : George Suciu (george [at] beia [dot] ro, Peroni 16, Bucharest, Romania, Tel: +40374104901, Fax: +40213323006)

Project financed by UEFISCDI through the European and International Cooperation Program

More information on Virtuose Celtic-Plus website and European project website and Romanian project website.

Eureka project website

The main goal of VIRTUOSE project is to develop video services utilizing virtualization techniques. With the use of virtualization techniques, we can develop service, which is scalable and secure and can easily be deployed to different computing platforms. This enables the partners to leverage their services to new markets, and offer cost-efficient solutions.

The VIRTUOSE project focuses initially on selected use cases, which are: cloud gaming, video analytics, and surveillance, video conferencing, cable TV and video streaming (live and video-on-demand) services. Virtualization is expected to benefit all those use cases significantly.

Project’s results will be visible through demonstrators targeting tests which conclusions will be made public in order to disseminate the best practices in the domain. It is also the intention of the project to push its results to standardization bodies.

Business models and opportunities will be explored during the project. The business impact of the project will be the further delivery of new products and services utilizing virtualization techniques as an enabler.

Phase I – Use cases specification and business models [03/11/2017 – 31/12/2017]

  • Activity 1.1 Defining the use cases
  • Activity 1.2 Specifying business models and performance indicators

Phase description

Within this phase of the project, we analyzed the context and the users’ requirements as well as the business models through which the exploitation of the solution could be achieved.

Results

The main results achieved in Phase I of the project are:
– The first result from Activity 1.1 regards the use cases definition, through the research report,  by describing the main areas of interest within the project, presenting the potential cases and sub-cases of use for each particular area;
– The second result from Activity 1.2 relates to the identification of the technical challenges, business opportunities, and the market needs for the proposed solutions for development within the project (market study). Also, Activity 1.2 produced a market report covering the analysis of the current market and market potential for “gaming” solutions in “Cloud”, solutions for multi-party communications, video transcoding and distribution, and virtualized video analysis and surveillance.

–  The results achieved within phase I have been disseminated in the following events: participation at ELSE 2017 conference.

 

Phase I was completed on 31/12/2017.

Phase II – Architecture Design for Virtualized Services [01/01/2018 – 30/06/2018]

  • Activity 2.1 Analysis of the architectural requirements
  • Activity 2.2 Designing the common Cloud architecture and services

Phase description

Phase II – Architecture Design for virtualized services delivered two research reports.

Results

Phase II results regard:
• the definition of the functional and non-functional requirements for each use case;
• the specification of all the necessary constraints and data resources related to the services concerned;
• the definition of all the requirements and their evaluation taking into account the data resources and constraints.
Also, in this phase, was presented the design of the architecture for virtualized services, starting from the analysis of the requirements for the common cloud and services architecture.
As far as support activities, we have performed several actions to ensure the promotion of the project and to facilitate the exploitation of the phase II results within the dissemination strategy.
Thus, during Phase II of the VIRTUOSE project:
• BEIA attended several networking events such as Eureka and CEBIT 2018, and other related events (Drupa HackCamp, PRIA IT&C, IoT WEEK) in order to attract the interest of the potential customers of the platform.

The results achieved within phase II have been disseminated in the following events: participation at ELSE 2018 conference,  participation at COMM2018 conference.

Phase II was completed on 30/06/2018.

Phase III – Developing the model of the cloud service components [01/07/2018 – 31/12/2018]

  • Activity III.1 – Defining the model for virtualization
  • Activity III.2 – Development of the model for virtualized video processing

Phase description

• use cases regarding the specific components of Cloud services;
• specifying the virtualized services used;
• description of the component/algorithm and software for each virtualization service.

Phase III – Developing the model of the cloud service components delivered one research report and the experimental model of the algorithm of the virtualized video processing unit.

Results

In this phase were defined:
• the use cases regarding the specific components of Cloud services;
• the specifications of the virtualized services used;
• description of the component/algorithm and software for each virtualization service.

Components of the web virtualization services

Also, several meetings were organized with telecommunication operators, government representatives from the Ministry of Development and the City Hall, where Smart Parking, Videoconferencing, and video-support solutions were presented for the home-monitoring of disabled and elderly persons.

Phase IV – Designing the solution for specific scenarios [01/01/2019 – 30/06/2019]

  • Activity IV.1 – Elaboration of architecture and specific requirements for specific scenarios;
  • Activity IV.2 – Designing the solution for virtualized video analysis;
  • Support activities.

Phase description

Phase IV – Designing the solution for the specific scenarios, delivered one research report and an experimental model for the video virtualization solution.

Results

The results of phase IV regard the design of the architecture of VIRTUOSE components.  Also has been implemented the smart parking 3d visualization module.

Block architecture regarding the connection between the figure deliverables

Smart Parking 3D visualization module

In addition to presenting the components of the use case, this Phase presented the different components accessible to third parties to allow the construction of new video services over the VIRTUOSE toolkit.

The results achieved within phase IV have been disseminated in the following events: participation at ELSE 2019 conference, participation at WORLDCIST 2019.

Participation at the UNIFY Conference, Budapest,   4th  &  6th  of June 2019

 

Phase IV was completed on 30/06/2019.

Phase V – Development of the  virtualization solution [01/07/2019 – 31/12/2019] 

  • Activity V.1. Creating components for virtualization
  • Activity V.2. Testing the components

Phase description

The main purpose of this phase is to briefly memorize the definition of integration works and define test strategies to verify solutions emerged after the integration activities are working as per the design intent. The integration progress report focuses on the test strategy of the verification of integration works conducted on VIRTUOSE project. Tests regarding functionality, deployment, traffic, and security listed with their requirements, scenario details, expected output and types for the use cases cloud gaming, multi-party video conferencing, video transcoding and distribution and video analytics.

Results

This version of Integrations Definitions of Virtuose project have been analyzed in 4.2 delivery
document. A framework is utilized to introduce functional description, integration point description,
requirements and restrictions, activities and tasks, risk analysis and schedule. Detailed analysis has
been performed for each use case to evaluate integration activities from all aspects by utilizing this
framework to answer the questions; what are the functions of the target product or solution, why
integration is required, which components are integrated to each other, what are the requirements
and restrictions. A broad analysis to define activities and tasks, risk analysis and mitigation plan for
the risks are also given for a broad range analysis of the integrations. Schedule and definition of
responsibilities for each party is given as well to clarify the definitions of integrations.
Technological and economic impacts of each integration activity is discussed and those were given
in a table format to depict where exactly the integration activity adds the value. Additionally, a
complementarity analysis between different use cases is given to work on further integration points
for the creation of value added services.

During this phase, the specific use cases were tested and tests were made regarding the collaboration activities.

The results achieved within phase V have been disseminated in the following events: DResearch 2019 event, SpeD 2019, GIoTS 2019, Digital Assembly 2019.

Phase VI – Development and integration of the virtualized video service solution [01/01/2020 – 30/06/2020] 

  • Activity VI.1 – Defining the requirements for integration;
  • Activity VI.2 – Development of the integrated solution;

Phase description

The main objective of the cloud game integration activity is to provide remote users with video games with a maximum quality of user experience, balancing the exchange between quality and speed. Network latency cannot be avoided, but from the software side, this fast encryption technology provides adequate functionality to the service.
To do this, the software is built using standard reusable components such as ffmpeg and Gaming Anywhere (GAW). Clients connect to the server using the GAW client, and the GAW server and the client in turn run the specific version of ffmpeg, which includes these new features.
In addition, on the GAW server, we chose MAME to run different types of games, which allows measuring the quality of different types of interactions and movements.

Results

  • This document describes the final integration report that will be carried out within the Virtuose project. The integration report will include evaluations of the activities carried out for each specific use case on the results of activities for cloud games, multi-participant video communication, use cases on video analysis and transcoding & video distribution, as well as the results of collaborative activities between cloud games, multi-participant video conferencing and video analysis. The reuse of the motion activity detection algorithm developed on cloud games is evaluated to be used first on multi-participant video communication, then the layer selection algorithm developed in multi-participant video communication will be evaluated to be used on cloud games and finally the use of perceptual relevance metrics developed on cloud games will be discussed for use when using parking management.

Update: Successful integration of the demonstrators made by partners.

The results achieved within phase VI have been disseminated in the following events: ELSE 2020 and GIOTS 2020.

Phase VII – Demonstration and testing of the prototype [01/07/2020 – 31/10/2020] ONGOING

Phase VIII – Reporting on economic effects [01/11/2020 – 31/10/2021]

Phase IX- Reporting on economic effects [31/10/2021 – 31/10/2022]

Phase X – Reporting on economic effects [01/11/2022 – 31/10/2023] 

Publications

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation, CCCDI-UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P3-3.5-EUK-2017-02-0023 / ………….

Project meetings

  • F2F  meeting Bucuresti, 27th  &  28th  of September 2018

 

  • EuCNC Event in Valencia, 18th -20th of June 2019