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The Smooth Streaming Transport Protocol provides a means of delivering media from encoders to servers (in the case of live streaming) and from servers to clients in a way that can be cached by standard HTTP cache proxies in the communication chain. Allowing standard HTTP cache proxies to respond to requests on behalf of the server increases the number of clients that can be served by a single server.
The following figure depicts a typical communication pattern for the protocol.
Figure 1: Typical communication sequence for the Smooth Streaming Transport Protocol
The first message in the communication pattern is a Manifest Request, to which the server replies with a Manifest Response. The client then makes one or more Fragment Requests, and the server replies to each with a Fragment Response. Correlation between requests and responses is handled by the underlying Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) [RFC2616] layer.
The server role in the protocol is stateless, allowing each request from the client to be potentially handled by a different instance of the server, or by one or more HTTP cache proxies. The following figure depicts the communication pattern for requests for the same fragment, indicated as "Fragment Request X", when an HTTP cache proxy is used.
Figure 2: Typical communication pattern of requests for the same fragment