Nagare Media Engine: Towards Self-Adapting MPEG NBMP Multimedia Workflows

With ISO/IEC 23090-8 Network-Based Media Processing (NBMP), MPEG published a standard for today's multimedia workflows: complex distributed systems deployed in multi-cloud and multi-edge environments. It defines data models, APIs and a reference architecture for implementing and operating multimedia workflows as well as the corresponding workflow system. Next to the increased architectural complexity, multimedia workflows are subject to changing surroundings or objectives. As such, they are forced to adapt in order to still meet the workflow goals. In this paper, we explore self-adaptability in the context of NBMP to automate this process. We give an overview of adaptation types encountered in multimedia workflows. Moreover, we propose a general design for self-adapting NBMP workflows. Finally, we implement our approach as part of Nagare Media Engine, our existing open source NBMP implementation. The evaluation of our prototype demonstrates self-adaptability in an HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) scenario resulting in decreased computing resource usage.