An Open and Scalable Web-Based Interactive Live-Streaming architecture: The WILSP Platform

Interactive live-streaming applications and platforms face particular challenges: the actions of the viewer's affect the content of the stream. A minimal capture-render delay is critical. This is the case of applications, such as remote laboratories, which allow students to view specific hardware through a webcam, and interact with it remotely in close to real time. It is also the case of other applications, such as videoconferencing or remote rendering. In the latest years, several commercial live-streaming platforms have appeared. However, the most of them have two significant limitations. First, because they are oriented toward standard live-streaming, their capture-render delay tends to be too high for interactive live-streaming. Second, their architectures and sources are closed. That makes them unsuitable for many research and practical purposes, especially when customization is required. This paper presents the requirements for an interactive live-streaming platform, focusing on remote lab needs as a case study. Then, it proposes an architecture to satisfy those requirements that relies on Redis to achieve high scalability. The architecture is based on open technologies, and has been implemented and published as open source. From a client-side perspective, it is web-based and mobile-friendly. It is intended to be useful for both research and practical purposes. Finally, this paper experimentally evaluates the proposed architecture through its contributed implementation, analyzing its performance and scalability.