UNIX Socket FAQ

lamxuyen

Member

Registered: 2018-09-07

Posts: 2

How a data streaming works over the internet?

I know that a data stream is a big chunk of data, like a pipeline with two end points wherein data is put in one end and comes out the other.
Now, over the internet if a client machine requests for a file located on a server (according to what I know), the file is broken down into small packets wherein each packet has the source address and the destination address and it is sent to the respected destination and it can take any path over the network to reach to its destination.

If streaming works like the way i think it is i.e., like a pipeline with two end points where data is put in one end and comes out the other then does the end point from where the data is put in contains the source address and the end point from where the data has to come out contains the destination address.
Does it create a virtual pipe from source to the destination over the internet ? if it creates a virtual pipeline then what would happen if at some location over the path a network outage occurs ? won't all the streams of data will be lost ? how does it handles a situation like this ?

RobSeace

Administrator

From: Boston, MA

Registered: 2002-06-12

Posts: 3,839

Website

Re: How a data streaming works over the internet?

You seem to be describing TCP with your "pipelines"...  But, I suspect most video streaming (assuming that's what you're really talking about) protocols are going to be using UDP, and just letting dropped packets correspond to dropped frames of video...

But, in a TCP connection, if there's an outage somewhere along the route from source to destination, a new route will be tried if possible...  No data will be lost, because TCP resends data until it gets an ACK from the receiver...