Cloud Support for Latency-Sensitive Telephony Applications

Abstract

Cloud computing is great for scaling applications but the latency in a guest VM can be unpredictable due to resource contention between neighbors. For telephony applications, which are latency-sensitive, we propose a system to monitor telephony server latencies and adapt the server load based on the measured latencies. We implemented the system and evaluated it on an Amazon EC2 test bed. We show indirectly by comparing our server on EC2 and on a local VM, that there may be contention between EC2 VMs in the wild that leads to higher server latency. While there is some overhead due to constant monitoring of the server, our system manages to lower latency by reducing the load to the server.