The encyclopedia · Software & IT · Technical decision · 2021-2023
Huawei Cloud's GSCO cut live-streaming bandwidth cost by 30%.
Huawei Cloud's GSCO system optimized media-network traffic allocation, cutting bandwidth cost about 30% while carrying 10x the traffic.
Huawei Cloud
the move
Huawei Cloud delivers live video to users through a large media network. Bandwidth is charged on the 95th-percentile peak usage, so any wasted traffic during a spike is billed at the top rate. With rapid business growth, this made the cost of serving traffic enormous.
To minimize bandwidth cost while preserving quality, Huawei Cloud developed the GSCO system. It integrates demand forecasting, network planning and sequential offline-online traffic allocation, using mathematical programming models that were carefully decomposed so sub-problems could be solved quickly enough for live operation.
The system improved media-network utilization by more than 30%, reduced bandwidth cost — saving $49.6 million — while improving user-perceived quality, and supported a tenfold increase in traffic volume within two years.
why it works
- Peak-based billing means the worst-case spike sets the whole bill
- The problem is NP-hard, so good decomposition was essential to make it solvable
- Offline-online allocation separates planning from millisecond live decisions
- Better quality and lower cost improved both the business and the user experience
what transfers
When you are billed on the peak, a small inefficiency is multiplied; optimizing routing globally cuts cost without touching the servers or the stream quality.
what came after
Huawei Cloud was named a 2023 Franz Edelman Award finalist — the first time a cloud-computing company was shortlisted for its scheduling technology in the award's history. The system ran sports-event live streams with 100% pull-success rate and sub-800ms ultra-low-latency streams, and was rolled out to energy, transport, logistics and retail.
references
- Huawei Cloud shortlisted for the Franz Edelman Award, the top prize in operations research
- Huawei Cloud shortlisted for the global finals of the Franz Edelman Award
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