WebRTC-HTTP Egress Protocol (WHEP)

Protocol Operation In order to set up a streaming session, the WHEP Player will generate an SDP offer according to the JSEP rules and perform an HTTP POST request to the configured WHEP Endpoint URL. The HTTP POST request will have a content type of "application/sdp" and contain the SDP offer as the body. The WHEP Endpoint will generate an SDP answer and return a "201 Created" response with a content type of "application/sdp", the SDP answer as the body, and a Location header field pointing to the newly created resource. The SDP offer SHOULD use the "recvonly" attribute and the SDP answer MUST use "sendonly" the attribute.

HTTP POST and PATCH doing SDP O/A example The WHEP Resource COULD require a live publishing to be happening in order to allow a WHEP Players to start viewing a stream. In that case, the WHEP Resource SHALL return a "409 Conflict" response to the POST request issued by the WHEP Client with a Retry-After header indicating the number of seconds before sending a new request. WHEP Players MAY periodically try to connect to the WHEP Resource with exponential backoff period with an initial value of the Retry-After header value in the "409 Conflict" response. Once a session is set up, ICE consent freshness SHALL be used to detect abrupt disconnection and DTLS teardown for session termination by either side. To explicitly terminate a session, the WHEP Player MUST perform an HTTP DELETE request to the resource URL returned in the Location header field of the initial HTTP POST. Upon receiving the HTTP DELETE request, the WHEP resource will be removed and the resources freed on the Media Server, terminating the ICE and DTLS sessions. A Media Server terminating a session MUST follow the procedures in section 5.2 for immediate revocation of consent. The WHEP Endpoints MUST return an "405 Method Not Allowed" response for any HTTP GET, HEAD or PUT requests on the endpoint URL in order to reserve its usage for future versions of this protocol specification. The WHEP Endpoints MUST support OPTIONS requests for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) as defined in and it SHOULD include an "Accept-Post" header with a mime type value of "application/sdp" on the "200 OK" response to any OPTIONS request recevied as per . The WHEP Resources MUST return an"405 Method Not Allowed" for any HTTP GET, HEAD, POST or PUT requests on the resource URL in order to reserve its usage for future versions of this protocol specification.

ICE and NAT support The SDP provided by the WHEP Player MAY be sent after the full ICE gathering is complete with the full list of ICE candidates, or it MAY only contain local candidates (or even an empty list of candidates) as per . In order to simplify the protocol, there is no support for exchanging gathered trickle candidates from Media Server ICE candidates once the SDP answer is sent. The WHEP Endpoint SHALL gather all the ICE candidates for the Media Server before responding to the client request and the SDP answer SHALL contain the full list of ICE candidates of the Media Server. The Media Server MAY use ICE lite, while the WHEP player MUST implement full ICE. Trickle ICE and ICE restart support is OPTIONAL for a WHEP resource. If the WHEP resource supports either Trickle ICE or ICE restarts, the WHEP player MUST include an "Accept-Patch" header with a mime type value of "application/trickle-ice-sdpfrag" in the "201 Created" of the POST request that creates the WHEP resource as per section 3.1. If the WHEP resource supports either Trickle ICE or ICE restarts, but not both, it MUST return a "405 Not Implemented" response for the HTTP PATCH requests that are not supported. If the WHEP resource does not support the PATCH method for any purpose, it MUST return a "501 Not Implemented" response, as described in section 6.6.2. As the HTTP PATCH request sent by a WHEP player may be received out-of-order by the WHEP resource, the WHEP resource MUST generate a unique strong entity-tag identifying the ICE session as per section 2.3. The initial value of the entity-tag identifying the initial ICE session MUST be returned in an ETag header field in the "201 Created" response to the initial POST request to the WHEP endpoint. It MUST also be returned in the "200 OK" of any PATCH request that triggers an ICE restart. Note that including the ETag in the original "201 Created" response is only REQUIRED if the WHEP resource supports ICE restarts and OPTIONAL otherwise. A WHEP player sending a PATCH request for performing trickle ICE MUST include an "If-Match" header field with the latest known entity-tag as per section 3.1. When the PATCH request is received by the WHEP resource, it MUST compare the indicated entity-tag value with the current entity-tag of the resource as per section 3.1 and return a "412 Precondition Failed" response if they do not match. WHEP players SHOULD NOT use entity-tag validation when matching a specific ICE session is not required, such as for example when initiating a DELETE request to terminate a session. A WHEP resource receiving a PATCH request with new ICE candidates, but which does not perform an ICE restart, MUST return a "204 No Content" response without body. If the Media Server does not support a candidate transport or is not able to resolve the connection address, it MUST accept the HTTP request with the "204 No Content" response and silently discard the candidate.

Trickle ICE request A WHEP Player sending a PATCH request for performing ICE restart MUST contain an "If-Match" header field with a field-value "*" as per section 3.1. If the HTTP PATCH request results in an ICE restart, the WHEP resource SHALL return a "200 OK" with an "application/trickle-ice-sdpfrag" body containing the new ICE username fragment and password and OPTIONALLY a new set of ICE candidates for the WHIP client . Also, the "200 OK" response for a successful ICE restart MUST contain the new entity-tag corresponding to the new ICE session in an ETag response header field and MAY contain a new set of ICE candidates for the Media Server. If the ICE request cannot be satisfied by the WHEP resource, the resource MUST return an appropriate HTTP error code and MUST NOT terminate the session immediately. The WHEP player MAY retry performing a new ICE restart or terminate the session by issuing an HTTP DELETE request instead. In either case, the session MUST be terminated if the ICE consent expires as a consequence of the failed ICE restart as per section 5.1.

ICE restart request Because the WHEP Player needs to know the entity-tag associated with the ICE session in order to send new ICE candidates, it MUST buffer any gathered candidates before it receives the HTTP response to the initial POST request or the PATCH request with the new entity-tag value. Once it knows the entity-tag value, the WHEP Player SHOULD send a single aggregated HTTP PATCH request with all the ICE candidates it has buffered so far. In case of unstable network conditions, the ICE restart HTTP PATCH requests and responses might be received out of order. n order to mitigate this scenario, when the client performs an ICE restart, it MUST discard any previous ice username and passwords fragments and ignore any further HTTP PATCH response received from a pending HTTP PATCH request. WHEP Players MUST apply only the ICE information received in the response to the last sent request. If there is a mismatch between the ICE information at the client and at the server (because of an out-of-order request), the STUN requests will contain invalid ICE information and will be rejected by the server. When this situation is detected by the WHEP Player, it SHOULD send a new ICE restart request to the server.

WebRTC constraints In the specific case of media consumption from a streaming service, some assumptions can be made about the server-side which simplifies the WebRTC compliance burden, as detailed in WebRTC-gateway document . In order to reduce the complexity of implementing WHEP in both players and Media Servers, WHEP imposes the following restrictions regarding WebRTC usage: Both the WHEP Player and the WHEP Endpoint SHALL use SDP bundle . Each "m=" section MUST be part of a single BUNDLE group. Hence, when a WHEP Playersends an SDP offer, it MUST include a "bundle-only" attribute in each bundled "m=" section. The WHEP player and the Media Server MUST support multiplexed media associated with the BUNDLE group as per section 9. In addition, per the WHEP Player and Media Server will use RTP/RTCP multiplexing for all bundled media. The WHEP Player and Media Server SHOULD include the "rtcp-mux-only" attribute in each bundled "m=" section as per . Trickle ICE and ICE restarts support is OPTIONAL for both the WHEP Players and Media Servers as explained in section 4.1.

Load balancing and redirections WHEP Endpoints and Media Servers might not be co-located on the same server, so it is possible to load balance incoming requests to different Media Servers. WHEP Players SHALL support HTTP redirection via the "307 Temporary Redirect" response as described in section 6.4.7. The WHEP Resource URL MUST be a final one, and redirections are not required to be supported for the PATCH and DELETE requests sent to it. In case of high load, the WHEP endpoints MAY return a "503 Service Unavailable" response indicating that the server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overload or scheduled maintenance, which will likely be alleviated after some delay. The WHEP Endpoint might send a Retry-After header field indicating the minimum time that the user agent ought to wait before making a follow-up request.

STUN/TURN server configuration The WHEP Endpoint MAY return STUN/TURN server configuration URLs and credentials usable by the client in the "201 Created" response to the HTTP POST request to the WHEP Endpoint URL. Each STUN/TURN server will be returned using the "Link" header field with a "rel" attribute value of "ice-server" as specified in It might be also possible to configure the STUN/TURN server URLs with long-term credentials provided by either the broadcasting service or an external TURN provider on the WHEP Player, overriding the values provided by the WHEP Endpoint.

Authentication and authorization WHEP Endpoints and Resources MAY require the HTTP request to be authenticated using an HTTP Authorization header field with a Bearer token as specified in section 2.1. WHEP players MUST implement this authentication and authorization mechanism and send the HTTP Authorization header field in all HTTP requests sent to either the WHEP endpoint or resource except the preflight OPTIONS requests for CORS. The nature, syntax, and semantics of the bearer token, as well as how to distribute it to the client, is outside the scope of this document. Some examples of the kind of tokens that could be used are, but are not limited to, JWT tokens as per and or a shared secret stored on a database. WHEP Endpoints and Resources could perform the authentication and authorization by encoding an authentication token within the URLs for the WHEP Endpoints or Resources instead. In case the WHEP Player is not configured to use a bearer token, the HTTP Authorization header field must not be sent in any request.

Protocol extensions In order to support future extensions to be defined for the WHEP protocol, a common procedure for registering and announcing the new extensions is defined. Protocol extensions supported by the WHEP server MUST be advertised to the WHEP Player in the "201 Created" response to the initial HTTP POST request sent to the WHEP Endpoint. The WHEP Endpoint MUST return one "Link" header field for each extension, with the extension "rel" type attribute and the URI for the HTTP resource that will be available for receiving requests related to that extension. Protocol extensions are optional for both WHEP Players and WHEP Endpoints and Resources. WHEP Players MUST ignore any Link attribute with an unknown "rel" attribute value and WHEP Endpoints and Resources MUST NOT require the usage of any of the extensions. Each protocol extension MUST register a unique "rel" attribute value at IANA starting with the prefix: "urn:ietf:params:whep:ext" as specified in . In the first version of the WHEP specification, two optional extensions are defined: the Server Sent Events and the Video Layer Selection.

Server Sent Events extension This optional extesion provides support for server-to-client communication using WHATWG server sent events protocol as specified in https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/server-sent-events.html#server-sent-events. When supported by the WHEP resource, a "Link" header field with a "rel" attribute of "urn:ietf:params:whep:ext:sse" MUST be returned in the initial HTTP "201 Created" response, with the Url of the Server Sent Events REST API entrypoint. The "Link" header field MAY also contain an "events" attribute with a coma separated list of supported event types.

HTTP 201 response example containing the Server Sent Events extension ; rel="urn:ietf:params:whep:ext:core:server-sent-events" events="active,inactive,layers,viewercount" ]]> If the extension is also supported by the WHEP player, it MAY send a POST request to the Server Sent Events REST API entrypoint to create a server-to-client event stream using WHATWG server sent events protocol. The POST request MAY contain an "application/json" body with an JSON array indicating the subset of the event list announced by the WHEP Resource on the "events" atribute which COULD be sent by the server using the server-to-client communication channel. The WHEP Endpoint will return a "201 Created" response with a Location header field pointing to the newly created server-to-client event stream.

HTTP POST request to create a server-to-client event stream Once the server-to-client communication channel has been created the WHEP player can perform a long pull using the Url returned on the location header as expecified in the WHATWG server sent events protocol. When an event is generated, the WHEP Resource MUST check for each event stream if the type is on the list provided by the WHEP player when the event stream was created, and if so enque it for delivering when an active long pull request is available. The events types supported by this specification are the following:

active: indicating that there is an active publication ongoing for this resource.
inactive: indicating that there is no active publication ongoing for this resource.
layers: provides information about the video layers being published for this resource.
viewercount: provides the number of viewers currently connected to this resource.

The WHEP resource must indicate the event type in the "event" field and a JSON serialized string in the "data" field of the WHATWG server sent events message. In order to make the processing simpler on the WHEP Player, the WHEP resource MUST encode the event data in a single "data" line.

Example event The WHEP Player MAY destroy the event stream at anytime by sending a HTTP DELETE request to the Url returned on the location header on the created request. The WHEP Resource MUST drop any pending queued event and return a "404 Not found" if any further long pull request is received for the event stream. All the event streams associated with a WHEP Resource MUST be destroyed when the WHEP Resource is terminated.

active event The event is sent by the WHEP Resource when an active publication for the WHEP resource, either at the begining of the playback when the resource is created or later during the playback session.

event name: "active"
event data: JSON object (TBD)

inactive event The event is sent by the WHEP Resource when an active publication is no longer available. The WHEP Resource MUST not send an initial "inactive" event if there is no active publication when the resource is created.

event name: "active"
event data: JSON object (TBD)

layers event The event is sent by the WHEP Resource to provide information to the WHEP player about the avialable video layers or renditions to be used in conjuction with the Layer Selection extension defined in Chapter {TBD}.

event name: "layers"
event data: JSON object

The WHEP Resource MAY send the event periodically or just when the layer information has changed. The event data JSON object contains the video layer information available for each "m-line" indexed by the "m-line" order in the SDP. Each value of the JSON object entries will be a JSON object with the following attributes

active: (Array<Object>) Containing the information of the active simulcast layers.
inactive: (Array<Object>) Containing the information of the inactive simulcast layers.
layers: (Array<Object>) Containing the information of the active simulcast, spatials or temporal layers available for layer selection.

Each "active" JSON objet contains the following information:

id: (String) rid value of the simulcast encoding of the layer
simulcastIdx: (Number) the simulcast order of the encoding layer.
bitrate: (Number) the spatial layer id of the encoding layer.
width: (Number) the current video with of the encoding layer.
heigth: (Number) the current video height of the encoding layer.

Each "inactive" JSON contains the following information:

id: (String) rid value of the simulcast encoding of the layer.
simulcastIdx: (Number) the simulcast order of the encoding layer.
width: (Number) the current video with of the encoding layer
heigth: (Number) the current video height of the encoding layer.

Each "layer" JSON contains the following information:

encodingId: (String) rid value of the simulcast encoding of the layer
simulcastIdx: (Number) the simulcast order of the encoding layer.
spatialLayerId: (Number) the spatial layer id of the encoding layer.
temporalLayerId: (Number) the temporal layer id of the encoding layer.
bitrate: (Number) the spatial layer id of the encoding layer.
width: (Number) the current video with of the encoding layer.
heigth: (Number) the current video height of the encoding layer.

The "layer" object MUST containt at least one of the encodingId, spatialLayerId or temporalLayerId attributes, the other attributes are OPTIONAL.

Example event

viewercount event The event is sent by the WHEP Resource to provide the WHIP Player the information of number of viewers currently connected to this resource.

event name: "viewercount"
event data: JSON object containing a "viewercount" attribute with a Number value indicating the number of viewers currently watching the WHIP resource.

The viewer count provided by the WHEP Resource MAY be approximate and not updated in real time but periodically to avoid overloading both the event stream and the Media Server.

Video Layer Selection extension The Layer Selection extensions allows the WHEP Player to control which video layer or rendition is being delivered through the negotiated video MediaStreamTrack. When supported by the WHEP resource, a "Link" header field with a "rel" attribute of "urn:ietf:params:whep:ext:layer" MUST be returned in the initial HTTP "201 Created" response, with the Url of the Video Layer Selection REST API entrypoint. If this extension is supported by the WHEP Resource, the Server Sent Events extension MUST be supported as well and the "layers" event MUST be advertised as well.

HTTP 201 response example containing the Video Layer Selection extension ; rel="urn:ietf:params:whep:ext:core:layer" Link: ; rel="urn:ietf:params:whep:ext:core:server-sent-events" events="layers" ]]> In case that Simulcast or Scalable Video Codecs are supported by the Media Server and used in the active publication to the WHEP Resource, by default, the Media Server will choose one of the available video layers to be sent to the WHEP Player (based on bandwidth estimation or any other business logic). However, the WHEP Player (or the person watching the stream) may decide that it whishes to receive a different one (to preserve bandwidth or to best fit in the UI). In this case the WHEP Player MAY send a HTTP POST request to theVideo Layer Selection API entrypoint containing an "application/json" body with an JSON object indicating the information of the video layer that wishes to be received. The WHEP Endpoint will return a "200 OK" if the switch to the new video layer can be performed or an appropiate HTTP error response if not. The information that can sent on the JSON object in the POST request for doing layer selection is as follows:

mediaId: (String) m-line index to apply the layer selection(default: first video m-line)
encodingId: (String) rid value of the simulcast encoding of the track (default: automatic selection)
spatialLayerId: (Number) The spatial layer id to send to the outgoing stream (default: max layer available)
temporalLayerId: (Number) The temporaral layer id to send to the outgoing stream (default: max layer available)
maxSpatialLayerId: (Number) Max spatial layer id (default: unlimited)
maxTemporalLayerId: (Number) Max temporal layer id (default: unlimited)

The information about the avialable encodings, spatial or temporal layers should be retrieverd from a "layers" event sent by the WHEP Resource using the Server Sent Events extension: If the WHEP Player wishes to return to the default selection performed by the Media Server, it just need to send an empty JSON Object instead: