In this paper such a general architecture was presented based on Rejaie’s work on the architecture of media streaming servers, which took into consideration the functions and characteristics of live streaming servers, and incorporated the impacts of fluctuant network environment on them. In this architecture, four function modules, namely Rate Control Module, Error Control Module, Video Quality Adaptation Module and Buffer Control Module, comprise the whole server. These modules respectively perform specific tasks, and collaborate to enable the whole server systems to provide adaptive video streaming services as a whole. How they can interplay and cooperate was discussed thoroughly in this paper. This architecture presented in the paper can be flexibly configured according to specific needs of particular applications, and can be helpful to development of live streaming server systems.
