Modeling Real-Time Multimedia Streaming Using HLS Protocol

Information Technology

With the technology innovation in electronic devices, the rising demand for high-quality multimedia content will continually grow. Over the last years, there is a shift from the traditional approach of streaming the media content to the modern approach of adaptive bit-rate streaming, which offers the benefit of switching to the best quality video according to varying network conditions or available bandwidth thus providing the enriched user experience. The adaptive streaming methods are more or less wholly based on HTTP, so can efficiently work over large distributed networks. This paper aims to deploy HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) for streaming of real-time multimedia, to support mobile as well as desktop browsers without the use of any plugin and also to deliver multimedia with reduced latency, therefore allowing rich quality media content to be delivered over a large number of CDN (content delivery networks). Few added advantages of using HLS are: it can easily traverse through any firewall or proxy server, easier to cache, authentication and encryption (encryption is optional which can be done using AES-128), and recoverability from an outage.

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