RE: Minutes from W3C M&E IG call: Web and Networks Interest Group Introduction

The Web and Networks Interest Group has now been created. You can find details, including how to join, here:

https://www.w3.org/2019/05/web-networks-ig-charter.html

Chris

________________________________________
From: Chris Needham [chris.needham@bbc.co.uk]
Sent: 15 May 2019 19:40
To: public-web-and-tv@w3.org
Subject: Minutes from W3C M&E IG call: Web and Networks Interest Group  Introduction

Dear all,

The minutes from the last Media & Entertainment Interest Group call on Tuesday 7th May are available [1], and copied below.

Many thanks to Eric for presenting an introduction to the Web and Networks Interest Group. Eric's slides are at [2] and a recording of the presentation and following discussion is at [3].

We will share more details here when the Group is created.

Kind regards,

Chris (Co-chair, W3C Media & Entertainment Interest Group)

[1] https://www.w3.org/2019/05/07-me-minutes.html
[2] https://www.w3.org/2011/webtv/wiki/images/3/3e/2019-05-07-web-and-networks.pdf
[3] https://media.w3.org/2019/05/meig-2019-05-07.mp4


--

W3C

- DRAFT -

Media and Entertainment IG

7 May 2019

Attendees

Present
        Kaz_Ashimura, Andreas_Tai, Barbara_Hochgesang, Chris_Needham, Eric_Siow, Louay_Bassbouss, Anssi_Kostiainen, Tatsuya_Igarashi, Francois_Daoust, Mark_Watson, Tony_Istvan, Glenn_Reitmeier, Steve_Morris, Greg_Meyer, Sudeep_Divakaran, Kazuhiro_Hoya, Rob_Smith

Regrets

Chair
        Chris_Needham

Scribe
        cpn, kaz

Contents

Topics

Agenda
        Introduction
        Recording today's call?
        Web and Networks IG
        Rechartering
        Next call

Summary of Action Items

Summary of Resolutions

<cpn> scribenick: cpn

# Agenda

Chris: Before we start, any AOB items?

<Barbara_H> What is the charter status of the Media & Entertainment IG and Media Working group?

# Introduction

Chris: This is slightly unusual for us, it's not a strictly media related topic,
..... but given the new Web & Networks IG has been proposed, there's enough overlap of interest for our members
..... that we wanted to invite the leaders of the Web & Networks IG to present, and discuss areas of common interest and collaboration between our IGs.

# Recording today's call?

<kaz> scribenick: kaz

Chris: (asks all if it's OK to record today's call and publish the audio publicly (like the minutes from this call), and there were no objections)

# Web and Networks IG

<cpn> https://www.w3.org/2011/webtv/wiki/images/3/3e/2019-05-07-web-and-networks.pdf (Slides)

<kaz> http://media.w3.org/2019/05/meig-2019-05-07.mp4 (Recorded video)

<cpn> scribenick: cpn

Eric: Thank you for the opportunity to share the new, to be formed, Web and Networks Interest Group.
..... The charter just passed AC review, so should be formed within a couple of weeks.
..... I'll give some history of how this IG came to be formed. We had a Web5G workshop in London last year,
..... to explore the opportunity with 5G and the Web. We had a lot of interesting technical presentations and discussion.
..... At the end of the workshop, we asked ourselves what are the problem statements that we're trying to address?
..... We were not able to articulate succinctly what those problem statements are.
..... We also noticed that we did not have all the key stakeholders in the room, in particular, the browser vendors.
..... We decided not create a formal group, instead an informal task force to explore and to find the problem statements that resonate with the ecosystem,
..... and then invest some upfront effort in socializing and outreach to enrol the key stakeholders.
..... The important thing was having all the right stakeholders agree that these are problems they are interested in solving.
..... Before any technical specs are developed, we want to make sure there's a high probability of implementation when technical work is done.
..... (Slide 2) I'll describe the problem statements, potential solution approaches, share some sample use cases, and then give an overview of the mission and scope of the IG.
..... I'll also explain how the Web & Networks IG will work with other groups inside and outside of W3C.
..... It's important not to duplicate work, also not confuse the market and stakeholders as to what's happening.
..... I'll give an update on the ecosystem enrolment and outreach we've been doing.
..... One of the purposes of this call is to encourage all of you to join, when the IG is formed.
..... (Slide 3) There are three problem statements.
..... 1. Web browsers and apps today function agnostic of the network types.
..... There are some basic tools in Chrome for developers to simulate how their apps might perform under different network types,
..... but there's no capability of doing that during runtime.
..... There are also a lot of capabilities at the protocol level, to optimise media and video transmission.
..... Web apps are moving from native to the browser. It would be great to introduce new browser capabilities to give the deveoper information, e.g,. on network quality and performance during runtime.
..... 2. This came from network operators: developers have limited information coming from the browser to anticipate what kinds of resources are needed for their app.
..... There are techniques like DPI (deep packet inspection), but there's a lot privacy concerns and the community has pushed back on DPI.
..... If there's a way for some of these requirements be communicated between app and network, it would be useful.
..... 3. App developers need better tools to test their applications under different network conditions.
..... For example, to compare how apps might run on the edge, vs on the cloud..
..... As the work evolved, the scope extended beyond 5G, so the IG will explore how web apps will work on all kinds of networks: wifi, 4G, LTE, 5G.
..... Ecosystem stakeholder enrolment and participation is key, so we're focused on getting all the stakeholders to participate in this work.
..... (Slide 4) You'll be familiar with the waiting experience (video buffering).
..... This depends on various factors: the size of the upload, the kind of network exchange, latency vs bandwidth tradeoff.
..... Also, time for processing on the edge vs the cloud.
..... Device capabilities, battery condition, processing power, all come into play.
..... (Slide 5) This is a high level approach to solutions. AT&T were emphatic to communicate this with the community.
..... We're looking at providing explicit hints in both directions between web browsers and the network.
..... The community has historically resisted techniques like DPI, and invasion of privacy.
..... These hints could be early hints or instantaneous hints. For example, someone who is moving around and using the 5G network: the cells are very small so there are a lot of handovers moving between cells.
..... So having instantaneous hints and the ability to adjust on the fly would be very useful.
..... That's the general direction we're proposing. We would investigate this as well as other ideas with members of the ecosystem.
..... (Slide 6) To enhance the user QoE, we would introduce contextual awareness between apps and the other components: the device, network, browser, OS, cloud service or the CDNs.
..... There are various aspects of contextual awareness. First, what kind of application is it? Video, web browsing, what metrics to use to measure the experience and adjust on the go?
..... Another aspect is the network context: what's the condition of the network at that moment, conjestion level, back haul, latency and throughput, all need to be taken into account.
..... Device context, what kind of device is running the app? And user context: allowing the user to indicate their preference - whether they want the cost of running a workload in the cloud or on the edge or device.
..... Also, Environmental context, relay services available at the moment.
..... (Slide 7) I'll share a sample use case. This is a machine learning workload, running on the cloud vs on the edge.
..... There all kinds of tradeoffs doing this kind of workload.
..... My colleague Sudeep Divakaran, one of the IG co-chairs, ran this workload.
..... [A picture of a kingfisher run through the Berkeley cloud service].
..... (Slide 8) The processing time to get this result was quick, 0.1 seconds, but the round trip time is 3.4 seconds.
..... The result is detailed and quick, but the waiting time of sending the request to the cloud took 3.4 seconds.
..... (Slide 9) Running it on the edge, it takes longer, 0.18 seconds, not a huge difference, but the round trip time is a lot faster, about 7 milliseconds, but you compromise on the detail in the results.
..... This illustrates the choices the user can make, and the service provider and network service provider.
..... If you extend this use case to other workloads, there's a lot of variation.
..... Having the intelligence to communicate between the networks and browser and apps would be useful.
..... (Slide 10) IG Mission and scope. The mission is to explore solutions for applications to leverage network capabilities.
..... The goal is to achieve better performance and resource allocation both on the device and networks.
..... Scope includes hints, explicit hints, also finding ways to expose specialised services and applications.
..... For example, differentiative services, integrated services, 5G network slicing, edge computing.
..... In terms of applications, there's AR, VR, streaming, workload balancing between edge and cloud for machine learning inferencing.
..... The third part of the scope is exposure of aggregated web metrics, to allow you to monitor for troubleshooting purposes, and make adjustments at runtime.
..... (Slide 11) Coordination with W3C groups. We listed the most relevant groups, but we also want to be inclusive, get inputs from everyone and coordinate.
..... Important to coordinate with M&E IG in particular, we don't want to duplicate here, and we want to make sure members of this group are participating in both IGs, to get the use cases and requirements.
..... As this is an IG, we won't do any specification development. The work will be farmed out, e.g., to WebRTC WG, passing to them the use cases and requirements developed in the IG.
..... (Slide 12) Coordination with external groups. There are lots of standards bodies working in related areas, e.g., 3GPP, MPEG.
..... We'll ensure we're liaising with those groups, we want to stay within W3C's core competency and not do work that's a core competency in those other standards groups.
..... (Slide 13) Regarding stakeholder enrolment, we have categorised stakeholders: app developers, OS vendors, networks, broadcast networks, content providers, semiconductors, etc.
..... The logos show a sample of companies we've talked to in workshop, the task force, or the meeting at TPAC last year, or one on one conversations to get input.
..... This effort is ongoing, so this gives an indication of the companies we've been getting input and interest to participate.
..... In the AC review response, over 20 companies supported the charter. Three members left comments: only two minor ones, and we'll make changes and form the IG.
..... It should be up and running in a couple of weeks.
..... To end, I want to encourage everyone to look at the IG, and we want to welcome you to participate in the discussion to gather use cases and requirements, then figure out who to liaise with going forward.
..... The two co-chairs are Dan Druta from AT&T, and Sudeep Divakaran from Intel. I will continue to be involved, on the outreach.

<kaz> scribenick: kaz

Chris: Thank you for presenting today!
..... In the M&E IG we look at some network related aspects, e.g., adaptive media streaming is an important technique for managing media delivery over changing network conditions.
..... We have some APIs in development now for providing information to web applications to optimise streaming delivery, e.g., Media Capabilities.
..... How do you envisage the collaboration between the IGs, as you get started?

Eric: As a first step, we'd ask for contribution of use cases. It would be great to get key use cases from M&E IG already generated, where you see relevance.
..... We can look into them rather than starting from ground zero. Also, having you part of the Interest Group, so we don't do anything in conflict.
..... Also defining some requirements to feed in to the discussion.
..... As we compile use cases and requirements, we're not conflicting with each other's work.

Chris: I see our two groups as being quite complementary, so we'd want to keep in close contact.
..... Do you have any other use cases some of the stakeholders mentioned?

Eric: Note that the IG isn't formed yet. We have some from within Intel from our business units, we're planning to bring those. From other stakeholders, many say this is interesting work, things we're thinking about.
..... Hopefully once the IG is formed, and the call for use case contributions is made, they will also contribute to the discussion.

Chris: How do you see the group would be organized, phone calls, emails and GitHub?

Eric: I would defer to Dan and Sudeep on that.
..... I imagine a combination of calls, emails, we're planning to be at TPAC on the Tuesday.
..... I would imagine before the F2F in Japan (TPAC 2019) we'll have a number of conference calls to start gathering use cases, to make the F2F productive.

Chris: Anyone else have observations or questions?

Glenn: Thank you for your presentation.
..... Regarding other organizations to have liaisons with, I'd recommend consideration of DASH-IF and Streaming Video Alliance in addition.

Eric: Sure, as we gather requirements, please raise that, so the Chairs can handle that and have the right liaisons.

Chris: That's an interesting case of the complementary interest between the IGs.

Eric: We recognize the importance of cross coordination with all of you.

Chris: Any more questions?

Eric: That's it! Thank you for the opportunity to share this with you.

Chris: Thank you for presenting today, it's really interesting, and I wish you success in getting the IG up and running.

# Rechartering

Chris: We have a charter review open right now, for the M&E IG, review is ongoing, please respond.
..... Feedback on the charter is welcome, or topics for these regular calls.

# Next call

Chris: We plan to return to looking at the media specs in incubation. June 4.

[adjourned]

Summary of Action Items
Summary of Resolutions
[End of minutes]
Minutes formatted by David Booth's scribe.perl version 1.152 (CVS log)
$Date: 2019/05/15 14:56:41 $

Received on Friday, 17 May 2019 13:18:31 UTC