Mobile-to-mobile multimedia streaming using REST-based mobile services

Multimedia applications are bandwidth-hungry and delay-sensitive applications by nature. On the other hand, mobile networks are less bandwidth networks whereas mobile devices are resource constrained devices in terms of processing, storage and power. Thus talking about Mobile-to-Mobile (M2M) multimedia streaming, it becomes an ultimate responsibility of a mobile server platform to provide an efficient mechanism for the management and control of multimedia streaming on the fly. The paper deals with the problem and proposes multimedia extensions to an existing light-weight Mobile Web Server (MWS) platform, which is based on Representational State Transfer (REST) design principles. The Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is used to control multimedia streaming and its mapping over REST designed server is discussed in detail. Multimedia transmission is achieved by Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP) and the simplest frame structure of RTP has been proposed for this purpose. The control information is sent over TCP to achieve reliability whereas the media data is sent over UDP to attain better performance.