Containerisation in Multimedia Research Test Beds

This paper proposes an innovative, flexible, and easily reproducible test bed that facilitates large scale multimedia (MM) quality centric experiments. It makes use of Linux container technologies and several other utilities that collectively facilitate ease of deployment, minimal resource utilisation and better reproducibility. We outline the significant advantages of this approach over physical test beds, virtual machines and simulation and showcase it in an experiment dealing with speech quality aspects of WebRTC using the state-of-the-art quality prediction model, i.e. POLQA. However, it can be easily extended for any type of real time communication (RTC) and MM content. The particular test bed involves a single host on which multiple WebRTC based VoIP endpoints run within Linux containers. The test bed also comprises a native network emulator running between the endpoints. Several other tools are additionally incorporated in the test bed so that speech quality of the transmitted signal can be evaluated using objective quality prediction models, such as PESQ, POLQA, etc.