Efficient data transmission in service workflows for distributed video content analysis

ABSTRACT

Workflows of web services orchestrated by the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) have been successfully used in many business applications. Although these technologies were not originally designed for multimedia processing, they offer advantages to speed up the development of distributed multimedia analysis applications by allowing the composition or reconfiguration of existing services. However, in the case of service-oriented distributed video content analysis, a huge amount of binary data has to be transferred between different services. As a consequence, service orchestration based on BPEL leads to a performance bottleneck due to indirect message and data transport: the workflow engine receives results (which are potentially very large) from finished services and passes them to a subsequent service. In this paper, we present two novel approaches based on our previously developed Flex-SwA framework to model the binary data transmission between services in BPEL workflows. The proposed approaches circumvent the performance bottleneck at the orchestrating engine and provide efficient possibilities to transfer large data amounts as well as large data units. The first approach models the data flow in BPEL; the services exchange data directly. The second approach models the data flow outside of the BPEL engine and shifts it completely to the Flex-SwA framework. Experimental results for a video analysis workflow demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approaches.

REFERENCES

• 1: BPEL specification version 1.1. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/specification/ws-bpel/.
• 2: OpenCV, 2008. http://www.intel.com/technology/computing/opencv/.
• 3: Adam Barker , Jon B. Weissman , Jano van Hemert, Orchestrating Data-Centric Workflows, Proceedings of the 2008 Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, p.210-217, May 19-22, 2008 [doi>10.1109/CCGRID.2008.50]
• 4: J. D. Blower, A. B. Harrison, and K. Haines. Styx Grid Services: Lightweight, Easy-to-Use Middleware for Scientific Workflows. In International Conference on Computational Science (3), pages 996--1003, 2006.
• 5: T. Dörnemann, T. Friese, S. Herdt, E. Juhnke, and B. Freisleben. Grid Workflow Modelling Using Grid-Specific BPEL Extensions. In Proceedings of German e-Science Conference, 2007.
• 6: Viktor S. Wold Eide , Frank Eliassen , Ole-Christoffer Granmo , Olav Lysne, Scalable Independent Multi-level Distribution in Multimedia Content Analysis, Proceedings of the Joint International Workshops on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Protocols for Multimedia Systems: Protocols and Systems for Interactive Distributed Multimedia, p.37-48, November 26-29, 2002
• 7: I. Foster. Globus Toolkit Version 4: Software for Service-Oriented Systems. In International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing (IFIP), Springer-Verlag LNCS 3779, pages 2--13, 2005.
• 8: T. Friese, M. Smith, and B. Freisleben. GDT: A Toolkit for Grid Service Development. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Grid Service Engineering and Management, pages 131--148, 2006.
• 9: S. Graham, A. Karmarkar, J. Mischkinsky, I. Robinson, I. Sedukhin, J. Treadwell, L. Srinivasan, T. Banks, T. Maguire, D. Snelling, L. Liu, and S. Meder. Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF), April 2006. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsrf.
• 10: Steffen Heinzl , Markus Mathes , Bernd Freisleben, A Web Service Communication Policy for Describing Non-standard Application Requirements, Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on Applications and the Internet, p.40-47, July 28-August 01, 2008 [doi>10.1109/SAINT.2008.14]
• 11: Steffen Heinzl , Markus Mathes , Thomas Friese , Matthew Smith , Bernd Freisleben, Flex-SwA: Flexible Exchange of Binary Data Based on SOAP Messages with Attachments, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services, p.3-10, September 18-22, 2006 [doi>10.1109/ICWS.2006.65]
• 12: Markus Mathes , Steffen Heinzl , Bernd Freisleben, WS-TemporalPolicy: A WS-Policy Extension for Describing Service Properties with Time Constraints, Proceedings of the 2008 32nd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference, p.1180-1186, July 28-August 01, 2008 [doi>10.1109/COMPSAC.2008.105]
• 13: Markus Mathes , Steffen Heinzl , Thomas Friese , Bernd Freisleben, Enabling Post-Invocation Parameter Transmission in Service-Oriented Environments, Proceedings of the International conference on Networking and Services, p.55, July 16-18, 2006 [doi>10.1109/ICNS.2006.44]
• 14: J. Nesvadba, P. Fonseca, A. Sinitsyn, F. de Lange, M. Thijssen, P. van Kaam, H. Liu, R. van Leeuwen, J. Lukkien, A. Korostelev, J. Ypma, B. Kroon, H. Celik, A. Hanjalic, U. Naci, J. Benois-Pineau, P. de With, and J. Han. Real-Time and Distributed AV Content Analysis System for Consumer Electronics Networks. In Proc. of International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, pages 1549--1552. IEEE Computer Society, 2005.
• 15: Philippe Salembier, Overview of the MPEG-7 standard and of future challenges for visual information analysis, EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, v.2002 n.4, p.343-353, April 2002 [doi>10.1155/S1110865702000781]
• 16: Paul Viola , Michael J. Jones, Robust Real-Time Face Detection, International Journal of Computer Vision, v.57 n.2, p.137-154, May 2004 [doi>10.1023/B:VISI.0000013087.49260.fb]
• 17: Hongwei Zeng , Huaikou Miao, Data Communication Model of Grid Workflow, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering, p.647-654, October 24-26, 2006 [doi>10.1109/ICEBE.2006.37]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.8 Performance

General Terms:
Design, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
BPEL, data streaming, grid services, multimedia analysis architecture, web services