Vidyo@CERN: A Service Update

We will present an overview of the current real-time video service offering for the LHC, in particular the operation of the CERN Vidyo service will be described in terms of consolidated performance and scale: The service is an increasingly critical part of the daily activity of the LHC collaborations, topping recently more than 50 million minutes of communication in one year, with peaks of up to 852 simultaneous connections. We will elaborate on the improvement of some front-end key features such as the integration with CERN Indico, or the enhancements of the Unified Client and also on new ones, released or in the pipeline, such as a new WebRTC client and CERN SSO/Federated SSO integration. An overview of future infrastructure improvements, such as virtualization techniques of Vidyo routers and geo-location mechanisms for load-balancing and optimum user distribution across the service infrastructure will also be discussed. The work done by CERN to improve the monitoring of its Vidyo network will also be presented and demoed. As a last point, we will touch the roadmap and strategy established by CERN and Vidyo with a clear objective of optimizing the service both on the end client and backend infrastructure to make it truly universal, to serve Global Science. To achieve those actions, the introduction of the multitenant concept to serve different communities is needed. This is one of the consequences of CERN's decision to offer the Vidyo service currently operated for the LHC, to other Sciences, Institutions and Virtual Organizations beyond HEP that might express interest for it.


Introduction
CERN and the LHC community at large have a long experience using videoconference. The requirements and the need for connecting remotely dispersed groups at a global scale were present since the middle 90s.
After several initiatives to develop and support a tool within the community, until 2008, a tender was needed to find alternative technology, due to a change of business model. This change of business model implied the setup of a committee with representatives of the major user communities in order to establish the user requirements and make a market survey. This effort is still seen as an excellent example of strong coordination and cooperation between CERN IT, the Experiments and main Research Labs.
After a pilot phase of 6 months, the Vidyo system was selected. On 1 st of January 2013, it has been the sole official desktop videoconference system supported on the LHC community, where CERN IT based it's global videoconferencing service [1].  On the pipeline to be released, there are features such as CERN SSO support and the ability to connect Skype for Business clients to Vidyo based meetings. The use cases for videoconferencing at CERN evolved also considerably since the service became consolidated on the day-to-day activity of the community. Together with the most typical use cases of several parallel working meetings using all possible instruments to connect (desktops, rooms, smartphones, tablets and phone calls), with variant attendance, the service is now systematically present in basically all the activities that imply remote attendance, from large scale public events to all Outreach initiatives, including a set of popular Virtual Visits to ATLAS and CMS experiments control rooms, using fixed and mobile setups.

Scale
To serve the use cases mentioned and the entire system load that it involves, a massively distributed service based on Vidyo is maintained and enhanced. The strong points about CERN's Vidyo infrastructure lay on the multiplatform capabilities (from Desktops to Mobiles and H.323/SIP room codecs), the scalable architecture and the strong resilience to poor network conditions.
The current deployed infrastructure is showed in Fig. 2. The current service has the capacity of hosting 50000 user accounts, 800-1600 simultaneous connections, up to 168 H323/SIP simultaneous connections, 11 phone access points worldwide and 12 simultaneous recordings.

Usage
In the following graphs, the current usage of the service is depicted. As one can see in Fig 3., the current peaks of the usage are nearing 900 simultaneous calls in more than 7900 meetings per month. 58000 Vidyo Desktop clients have been installed in desktops and mobiles.
The whole activity corresponds to an average of more than 50 million videoconferencing minutes per year, that is more than the load claimed by several commercial vendors, from all their customers Below, Fig. 4 shows one example among many [5].

User Survey
CERN IT conducted a user survey by the end of 2014. The objective was to understand the overall satisfaction and potential areas of improvement. The survey was sent to an Universe of 10000 users, during 2 months. 150 replies have been collected. As depicted in Fig. 5., the results are clearly positive. The main area of improvement identified has been the Linux distributions support. An action plan has been put in place in order to address the issue that include a concentration of development resources on the most widely used platforms and on making available alternative to access the meetings Web based that are not relying entirely on native clients and OS architectures.

Indico Integration
One of the key components from the start were the integrations available from day one with the current IT infrastructure serving the LHC. The most appreciated on the user survey mentioned, was Indico's[7] integration. Basically, from a given event managed on Indico, as depicted in Fig. 6. users can create Vidyo virtual rooms associated to it, including direct access to the meeting from the event page, either from Desktops/Mobiles of from a CERN equipped videoconferencing room.

Reporting and Monitoring Tools
In order to have "eyes" on the real time activity of such a big infrastructure, CERN IT decided to develop in-house a set of reporting and monitoring tools adapted to CERN Vidyo Service. The ones provided by the product itself were not found fully comprehensive for such a use case.
A live Web reporting tool [3] is now available either for users or managers, based on queries to the Vidyo CDR (Call Detail Record) database. Together with these queries, a set of data displays has been produced, built on open source frameworks as D3js.org [6], in order to exhaustively display the relevant data.
The tool has been found so successful that it has triggered a lot of interest from many companies from several sectors, from Healthcare, Education and IT, etc. that are supporting deployments of Vidyo such as CERN's. To cope with this demand, CERN has decided to dual license the set of dashboards under a dual licensing mechanism: AGPL for any organizations with no commercial interest, wanting to use it as it is or willing to open any improvements made; and a commercial license for all organizations that want the software, modify it to use or to distribute it commercially.
In Fig. 7., a view of the amount of the users connected simultaneously to the system in a given moment is showed.

Future
The CERN Vidyo service is now consolidated on the day-to-day activity of the LHC communities. CERN IT plans to continue to develop it based on the evolving requirements of the community and on forthcoming technology advancements.

Plans
CERN SSO with SAML support, a critical requirement on Research communities will be released during 2015.
Still in terms of infrastructure enhancements, the roadmap is also very rich: new infrastructure additions are completely virtualized with the introduction of dynamic distribution of clients in routers (router proximity) will also take place.
On the client side CERN IT is following the technology trends and started the development a WebRTC [8] client to be available by mid Summer 2015.
WebRTC is an open source project aiming to enable Web browsers with Real Time Communication (RTC) capabilities. Even if there is certain hype currently, WebRTC is considered among many as the beginning of a new era in real-time communication possibilities on the Web. Some of the main players are Google, Firefox, or Microsoft. Vidyo is currently on active collaboration with Google to develop Scalable Video Coding (SVC) as part of the WebRTC client open-source project to be supported natively on the Vidyo product. Leveraging on these efforts, CERN IT intends to fully profit from it, both to mitigate native client issues on some platforms and to turn the service truly universal. The idea of system universality is a key one, as CERN has been asked to extend the current service to the Research and Education world, out of the HEP community. This effort is already ongoing and should have the concrete results by the second half of 2015.