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arXiv · 2503.11649

Scalable Video Conferencing Using SDN Principles

Oliver Michel·Satadal Sengupta·Hyojoon Kim·Ravi Netravali·Jennifer Rexford
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Abstract

Video-conferencing applications face an unwavering surge in traffic, stressing their underlying infrastructure in unprecedented ways. This paper rethinks the key building block for conferencing infrastructures -- selective forwarding units (SFUs). SFUs relay and adapt media streams between participants and, today, run in software on general-purpose servers. Our main insight, discerned from dissecting the operation of production SFU servers, is that SFUs largely mimic traditional packet-processing operations such as dropping and forwarding. Guided by this, we present Scallop, an SDN-inspired SFU that decouples video-conferencing applications into a hardware-based data plane for latency-sensitive and frequent media operations, and a software control plane for the (infrequent) remaining tasks, such as analyzing feedback signals. Our Tofino-based implementation fully supports WebRTC and delivers 7-210 times improved scaling over a 32-core commodity server, while reaping performance improvements by cutting forwarding-induced latency by 26 times.

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Oliver Michel, Satadal Sengupta, Hyojoon Kim, Ravi Netravali, Jennifer Rexford. 2025-03-14. Scalable Video Conferencing Using SDN Principles. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11649

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