Opportunities and Challenges of HTTP Adaptive Streaming

HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has emerged as the prominent technology for the delivery of audiovisual content over the Internet in recent years and has a major impact on network traffic. Although traditional stateful session-based streaming solution based on UDP was used initially for media content delivery, researchers and practitioners soon realize that HAS technology, due to get through firewalls friendly ,transfer NAT easily ,effectively utilize the existing networking infrastructure and provide uninterrupted video streaming service to users with dynamic network conditions and heterogeneous devices, has the potential to improve the Quality of Experiments compared with traditional streaming technologies. Consequently, various HAS media streaming solutions have been proposed and deployed successfully. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of HAS technology and discoveries achieved by numerous researchers. We describe the basic taxonomy of HTTP adaptive streaming systems and summarize the major issues associated with HAS systems’ design. Then we outline the key challenges and open problems and highlight possible avenues for future directions.