Fault Tolerance of RTMP Protocol for Live Video Streaming Applications in Hybrid Software-Defined Networks

Nowadays, video hosting services receive and stream videos using standard protocols like Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). During the streaming process, video file streams are usually divided into small multi-second parts, and the player receives these parts instead of the whole file at once. Most of the streaming protocols are capable of adaptive streaming and tolerating faults like device failures, and link disconnections. Faults might affect the performance of live streaming in terms of packet loss, latency, jitter, and video quality. The software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm has also gained momentum in enterprise networks due to its lower-cost management and better network utilization. However, full migration from the current networks to the SDN model is not practical. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of fault tolerance mechanisms of RTMP protocol on hybrid SDNs. In this paper, a practical and straightforward hybrid network architecture is proposed for gradual migration from traditional IP networks. Then, the performance of the RTMP protocol is tested for live video streaming on this network in the face of various faults. The results obtained from different experiments with different streams facing multiple failures show that the proposed network performs better in restoring RTMP streams compared to traditional networks.