A SOAP-Based Streaming Content Delivery Framework for Multimedia Web Services

Web services provide efficient development and deployment of interoperable and reusable applications. Multimedia Web services is an implementation of multimedia applications within the Web services framework. However, current Web services standards are not sufficient to cater for multimedia streaming, the commonly used delivery method for large multimedia objects. In this paper, a SOAP-based streaming content delivery framework for multimedia Web services is proposed. The framework uses an extension of existing SOAP standards which allows streaming content to be transmitted between two SOAP nodes over the HTTP protocol. The extension includes a new SOAP streaming message exchange pattern and its corresponding SOAP HTTP binding. The proposed framework is capable of delivering quality adaptive multimedia content to users with heterogeneous configurations and requirements. By incorporating a proxy server between the service provider and requester the efficiency of the content delivery can be improved using multimedia caching.