Flash-based Audio and Video Communication in the Cloud
📝 Abstract
Internet telephony and multimedia communication protocols have matured over the last fifteen years. Recently, the web is evolving as a popular platform for everything we do on the Internet including email, text chat, voice calls, discussions, enterprise apps and multi-party collaboration. Unfortunately, there is a disconnect between web and traditional Internet telephony protocols as they have ignored the constraints and requirements of each other. Consequently, the Flash Player is being used as a web browser plugin by many developers for web-based voice and video calls. We describe the challenges of video communication using a web browser, present a simple API using a Flash Player application, show how it supports wide range of web communication scenarios in the cloud, and describe how it can interoperate with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based systems. We describe both the advantages and challenges of Flash Player based communication applications. The presented API could guide future work on communication-related web protocol extensions.
💡 Analysis
Internet telephony and multimedia communication protocols have matured over the last fifteen years. Recently, the web is evolving as a popular platform for everything we do on the Internet including email, text chat, voice calls, discussions, enterprise apps and multi-party collaboration. Unfortunately, there is a disconnect between web and traditional Internet telephony protocols as they have ignored the constraints and requirements of each other. Consequently, the Flash Player is being used as a web browser plugin by many developers for web-based voice and video calls. We describe the challenges of video communication using a web browser, present a simple API using a Flash Player application, show how it supports wide range of web communication scenarios in the cloud, and describe how it can interoperate with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based systems. We describe both the advantages and challenges of Flash Player based communication applications. The presented API could guide future work on communication-related web protocol extensions.
📄 Content
Flash-based Audio and Video Communication in the Cloud Kundan Singh Intencity Cloud Technologies, San Francisco, CA, USA kundan10@gmail.com Carol Davids Illinois Institute of Technology, Wheaton, IL, USA davids@iit.edu
ABSTRACT
Internet telephony and multimedia communication protocols have
matured over the last fifteen years. Recently, the web is evolving
as a popular platform for everything we do on the Internet
including email, text chat, voice calls, discussions, enterprise apps
and multi-party collaboration. Unfortunately, there is a disconnect
between web and traditional Internet telephony protocols as they
have ignored the constraints and requirements of each other.
Consequently, the Flash Player is being used as a web browser
plugin by many developers for web-based voice and video calls.
We describe the challenges of video communication using a web
browser, present a simple API using a Flash Player application,
show how it supports wide range of web communication scenarios
in the cloud, and describe how it can interoperate with Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based systems. We describe both the
advantages and challenges of Flash Player based communication
applications. The presented API could guide future work on
communication-related web protocol extensions.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.11
[Software
Architectures]:
Web-based
multimedia
communication architecture
General Terms
Design, Experimentation
Keywords
Flash Player; Web video communication; cloud communication;
SIP; RTMP; video conference
- INTRODUCTION
The World-Wide-Web is powered by the Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP), and languages such as the Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML) and Javascript [1, 2]. Web protocol and
languages work within constraints such as cross domain and
device access restrictions. Many network firewalls open outbound
TCP port 80 and 443 to allow client-server connections from a
web browser to a server. On the other hand, Internet telephony
and multimedia communication are typically enabled by the
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the Real-time Transport
Protocol (RTP) [3, 4]. SIP-based Internet telephony has matured
over the last decade and a half with many audio and video
telephony products and services available today. A SIP user agent
(UA) contains both a client and a server, to initiate and receive
connections or requests. User agents communicate via centralized
rendezvous servers to discover each other, and exchange in-call
media packets end-to-end using RTP over UDP as shown in Fig.1.
Traditionally, these protocols have ignored the constraints of web
browsers such as missing a UDP transport and listening socket,
and due to the restrictions of firewalls and network address
translation (NAT), are difficult to implement within a web
browser. Lack of SIP tools in the browser is a huge missed
opportunity for communication with big impact on innovation.
Unlike the few hundred organizations working on SIP there are
millions of web developers who are holding the keys to the
countless web applications and to innovation.
With the popularity of the web, many applications are being moved to web servers and the cloud. The web browser has become the most important client application needed by end users. Cloud infrastructure has allowed organizations to build businesses solely on the web platform, e.g., email access, file backup storage, document editing and sharing, watching TV and movies, text chat, enterprise apps and multiparty collaboration. Hence, there is a huge demand to fill the gap caused by the disconnection between traditional Internet telephony protocols and web-based systems. This is evident from the new working groups’ effort [6, 7] within W3C and IETF proposed by major industry leaders such as Google and Skype. However, like any other extension to web protocol and language, it will take time or may not happen until all major browsers incorporate the new standard and build a truly interoperable web-based communication platform. Moreover, some businesses prefer proprietary technology to standards for digital rights management of content or the walled garden nature of communication service providers. Browser plugins such as Java applet and Flash Player have been used for many years to do web-based real-time communication. The Flash Player is available to almost everyone with an Internet connection, provides immersive communication experience within web browsing to end users, and is easy for developers to build on. Hence, many organizations are using Flash Player for real-time video communication and web-to-phone calls [12, 13]. With new extensions in the Flash Player for end-to-end media path and group communication, one can build a reusable web application gadget (widget) to enable wide range of web-based audio/video communication scenarios. Our Flash VideoIO project demonstrates such a widge
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