A Review on HTTP Streaming Strategies in Media Streaming

Abstract

Streaming is mostly referred as a delivery system for media content or dynamic data. HTTP was not designed for data streaming. HTTP communications are stateless, and they take place over TCP/IP where there is no continuous connection between the ends. Usually, HTTP responses are buffered rather than streamed. HTTP 1.1 added supports for streaming through keep-alive header so data could be streamed. There are various HTTP streaming strategies-Progressive http streaming, HDS (HTTP dynamic streaming), HLS (HTTP live streaming), HSS (Http smooth streaming), DASH(Dynamic adaptive streaming over http and some others. HTTP streaming works by break­ing the overall stream into a sequence of small HTTP-based file downloads, each download loading one short chunk of an overall potentially unbounded transport stream. My focus is on http streaming. In this paper, a review of various streaming strategies has been presented