[minutes] Web & Networks IG teleconference November 25

Hi,

The minutes of the Web & Networks IG teleconference held today are
available at:
  https://www.w3.org/2019/11/25-web-networks-minutes.html
with supporting slides at:
  https://www.w3.org/2019/11/25-web-networks-slides.pdf

The minutes are copied as text below.

Dom


                    Web & Networks IG teleconference

25 Nov 2019

   [2]Agenda

      [2]
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-networks-ig/2019Nov/0001.html

Attendees

   Present
          Dominique_Hazael-Massieux, Peipei_Guo, Picky, Qiao,
          Song, Sudeep, Dan_Druta, Chris_Needham, Qingqian,
          Jon_Devlin, joan_svennebring, Songfeng_Li, Larry_Zhao

   Regrets

   Chair
          sudeep, DanD, Song

   Scribe
          dom

Contents

     * [3]Topics
         1. [4]Intro
         2. [5]TPAC summary
         3. [6]Edge Computing Workstream
         4. [7]Network quality monitoring and Prediction
            workstream
         5. [8]Video Cloud Service
         6. [9]Peer-to-peer CDN
         7. [10]AOB
     * [11]Summary of Action Items
     * [12]Summary of Resolutions
     __________________________________________________________

   [13]slides

     [13] https://www.w3.org/2019/11/25-web-networks-slides.pdf

Intro

   Song: I'll be hosting the meeting - I'm Song from China Mobile,
   working with Sudeep (Intel), Dan (AT&T), Dom (W3C) to run these
   meetings
   ... would like to introduce 2 new attendees to this call
   ... Professor Qiao from BUPT (Beijing Univ Post &
   Telecommunications) - top engineering school in
   Telecommunication in China
   ... led the research and develop of the 3G, 4G and 5G in China
   ... Profession Qiao heads the network transmission institute
   and AC Rep of BUPT
   ... We also have Qingqian - he used to work for Baidu and now
   for a P2P CDN start up and he will give us a guest presentation
   today

   Sudeep: packed agenda today - we'll summarize our meetings at
   TPAC
   ... which led to the creation of 2 work streams - Dan will talk
   about Edge Computing, and I'll talk about Network prediction
   ... Song will describe the video cloud service
   ... and Qingqian will describe his work on a P2P CDN

TPAC summary

   Song: at TPAC, we had several relevant evetns
   ... a full day meeting on Sep 17, demos run on Sep 18 and a
   dedicated breakout session on edge computing
   ... the IG meeting discussed 3 main topics: scope/charter/tasks
   review
   ... guiding principles around the notion of network hints
   ... discussed use cases and requirements based on input from
   participants
   ... there were over 35 participants at the meeting - the links
   to the various presentations were posted on the list
   ... Key take aways from the meeting: we discussed use cases and
   requirements, looked at new solutions like link performance
   prediction,
   ... discussed extending developer tools to support better
   network
   ... We then had a breakout session during the unconference on
   edge computing
   ... discussing several relevant use cases
   ... There was also a demo of the link performance prediction -
   the video will be available soon

Edge Computing Workstream

   DanD: after the TPAC meeting and the TPAC breakotu session, we
   concluded that Edge computing is a particularly interesting
   topic for several participants
   ... we want to do more of a deep dive on the topic
   ... we hear a lot about edge computing in different fora and
   industry corners
   ... edge computing means a lot of different things to different
   people
   ... there are questions about where the edge live, what
   constraints apply to it
   ... the standardization work so far has happened mostly at the
   infrastructure level, not at the application level
   ... which need further exploration
   ... so we decided to approach this under two different angles:
   ... the first is to look at existing edge use cases with high
   bandwith / low latency requirements, e.g. AI/ML, Games, AR/VR
   ... and look at them from the Web perspective - how they would
   apply in the Web context
   ... we need to address a number of questions - how to make
   offloading transparent?
   ... is offloading visible to the client app or is it hidden by
   the browser sandbox?
   ... e.g. if you are to push some private keys for
   authentication - it's one thing if they stay on device, vs
   on-prem edge, vs a place where they could be stolen
   ... power would be another factor
   ... these are the kind of questions we want to look at in our
   first angle on this
   ... the second aspect was brought up by a number of folks and
   is to look at offloading some of the APIs to the edge,
   following the model of the split user agent concept
   ... a particular example would be to push a web worker, a
   service worker to the edge
   ... it could be used in the context of the Immersive Web, Web
   of Things
   ... there are challenages around statefulness, discovery,
   sharing of edge instances
   ... Concretely, we want to engage with key stakeholders to hear
   from their ideas
   ... we will have calls dedicated to this topic - the idea is to
   consolidate the ideas from both W3C and non W3C experts towards
   a proposed design

   Qiao: we could present our experience on the topic of splitting
   DNN between mobile browser and edge
   ... we've used this in the context of a Web AR applications
   ... I can prepare slides on this for a future meetnig

   cpn: wanted to briefly mention work that has happened in the
   Media & Entertainment IG
   ... we had a task force that looked at Cloud browser, who
   developed architecture and requirements that might be useful to
   this new work

   <cpn>
   [14]https://www.w3.org/2011/webtv/wiki/Main_Page/Cloud_Browser_
   TF

     [14] https://www.w3.org/2011/webtv/wiki/Main_Page/Cloud_Browser_TF

   Sudeep: should this be presented at an upcoming meeting?

   cpn: the initial proposers are no longer so active in W3C, so
   not sure how likely that would be, but will investigate

Network quality monitoring and Prediction workstream

   Sudeep: the second workstream came out of a very nice
   presentation from Intel during our TPAC meeting
   ... the presentation was on Link Performance Prediction,
   discussing how to predict network quality and adjust
   ... this was well received by IG participants
   ... we decide to start a workstream on this - there was also
   interest from the Intel team to look if and how this could be
   brought to browsers
   ... our goal is to explore how web apps can take advantage of
   network metrics and predictions
   ... we have identified 4 or 5 phases to approach this:
   ... first, analyse use cases and requirements - we have already
   a good starting point
   ... we learned from TPAC that there is existing work in this
   space (Net info API, Media & Entertainment existing work, ...)
   ... we need to review how much of this matches the need for
   this work
   ... in a second phase, we need to understand what needs to be
   done in the browser, in libraries, elsewhere
   ... next 3 phases depend on the result of the 1st two phases
   ... we would want lots of discussions and reviews from privacy
   IG, see intersections with WebRTC, Media & Entertainment to
   ensure we're in sync
   ... there will likely be need to coordinate with other
   standards groups
   ... As an IG, we're not doing specs - we could publish a white
   paper summarizing our findings
   ... we could also push for prototypes, maybe interop around
   them

Video Cloud Service

   Song: I want to talk about the perspective from operators and
   developers for cloud service videos
   ... Use cases include low-cost and high-efficient live video
   broadcasting
   ... in the Chinese market, there are two obstables for a
   in-house video system:
   ... the cost of of infrastructure resources
   ... even if you have the structure, it has to remain idle for
   most of the time
   ... One approach that has been taken is to use P2P CDN for this
   ... there are 4 top P2P CDN providers in China: Baidu, Alibaba,
   Tencent, iQIYI
   ... from a Web development perspective
   ... the fundamental needs for a Web-based video service -
   capture and codec API and decode / playback
   ... and a service API to interact with the video cloud, incl
   features for streaming, control, playback, analysis and
   security
   ... questions worth considering: how can web developers use
   video cloud more easily? would be useful both for cloud
   providers and devleopers
   ... in terms of security monitoring - how can video cloud be
   made efficient from a power and cost perspective?
   ... how do we bring the Web of Things perspective in this?
   ... when looking at edge resources deployed by operators in
   base stations, how can these be used by developers?

   Dom: how would you think we should approach these questions?

   Song: as operators, we would love to see standards from W3C in
   this space and we would adopt them in our deployment of 5G
   ... China Mobile runs an HTML5-based broadcast service across
   the country
   ... on 1st October (a national holiday), we got 1.2 billion
   mobile users access this service
   ... that service also ran multiple views of the broadcast
   ... this was only possible thanks to Edge computing deployed on
   our base stations across the country
   ... but anyone who would want to do the same would face the
   challenges I described

Peer-to-peer CDN

   Qingqian: I want to give an overview of the PCDN (peer-to-peer
   CDN) technology
   ... how Tingyu built our solution, and want to explore the
   intersection with the Web
   ... So what is a PCDN?
   ... a classical CDN system use HTTP and DNS to distribute the
   load across server nodes
   ... a PCDN is not based on DNS - the client contacts a tracker
   system (a super node, or a centralized system) which sends all
   the edge nodes to the client
   ... the client can then connect to all the edge nodes
   ... CDN costs a lot compared to a PCDN which can use idle
   upstream bandwidth
   ... The architecture of the Tingyu PCDN relies on an SDK for
   native apps - we're building one of the Web as I will discuss
   soon
   ... the client SDK has two features: it can use the P2P
   protocol to link to the edge nodes and download the content
   ... THe PCDN network has 3 type of edge nodes: the normal node
   like an IoT home device; a core node near the user; a super
   node as a central area node (closer to a cloud node)
   ... we have a decentralized filesystem that can syncrhonize
   files across these nodes
   ... the client SDK can also use HTTP to download the content
   from a classical CDN system
   ... which is itself synchronized with the PCDN decentralized
   filesystem
   ... if the user watns to download the content, the two
   protocols can be used at the same time
   ... the developer uses a server-side API to provide the content
   to the network
   ... I mentioned we've implemented this for native apps - we
   want to implement our SDK for Web browsers as well
   ... but there are open questions when we implement it:
   ... first, how can the browser connect to the PCDN? we use a
   P2P protocol just like bittorrent to connect to the edge node?
   can webrtc be used for this? another API?
   ... once connected, what protocol can we use between the
   browser and edge nodes?
   ... third problem: can we have an efficient way to find edge
   nodes by a centralized server or by another way?

   Dom: WebRTC sounds like a good canditate - have you looked at
   Web Transport as a possible new approach?

   Qiangqian: we'll try WebRTC - but we lack practice, so it will
   take time

   Sudeep: this whole idea of P2P CDN - it's driven by
   scalability, not looking at latency, right?

   Qiangqian: the goals are similar to a CDN, but with lower costs

   Song: low-latency would be another advantage of the proposal -
   lower cost is probably the primary motivation

   sudeep: so it's a bit of a mix of both
   ... re discovery of edge nodes, why not reuse DNS for it?

   Qiangqian: edge nodes are used to deliver the content via a P2P
   protocol (e.g. bittorrent)
   ... we use DNS for the centralized server
   ... it could run on HTTP and return the list of edge nodes -
   but is there another way?
   ... we may need a standard way to expose edge nodes via a
   standardized structure for edge node list

AOB

   Song: the slides and the minutes will be sent on the mailing
   list

   Sudeep: we should extract some of these questions to github to
   track them

Received on Monday, 25 November 2019 15:11:31 UTC