A Comparison of RTMP and HTTP Protocols with respect to Packet Loss and Delay Variation based on QoE

Abstract: In recent year’s multimedia services like Video-on-Demand (VoD) and mobile video streaming, videos for e-learning, video conferencing are growing predominantly, and the user’s expectations towards the quality video are increasing as the technology is developing. There are different video streaming protocols are used for streaming videos from servers to the client. Recently, Adobe Systems developed Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) (proprietary) for streaming audio, video and data over the Internet between a Flash player and a Media Server. On the other hand, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a well-known and efficient protocol; it has achieved the popularity in multimedia services like VoD. Hence, a qualitative research is to be performed on comparing the two Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) based protocols, under sustainable network conditions for tracing the QoE results from acquired User Ratings (UR). This thesis investigates the quality assets on network parameters over VoD streaming. The study addresses the subjective assessment of RTMP and HTTP streaming protocols, by varying network parameters (like packet loss and delay variation) in a controlled and repeatable environment. The packet loss and delay variation are altered by the network emulator NetEm [1, 2] in between the server and client. The video collected at the client end are evaluated by using subjective assessment, MOS (Mean Opinion Score), following the international Telecommunication Union (ITU) Recommendations [3]. Based on our results it was found that HTTP is having better ratings, when there are more packet losses compared to RTMP. RTMP accomplished better at minimum loss of packets. However, in the case of delay performance of HTTP is better than RTMP.