Advances in Network-adaptive Video Streaming

Abstract

Internet transmission is characterized by variations in throughput, delay, and packet loss, which can severely affect the quality of multimedia presentations delivered over the network. Still, Internet video streaming has experienced phenomenal growth in the last few years, owing to the extensive research in video coding and transmission. In this paper, we review several recent advances for network-adaptive video streaming that, we believe, will benefit the design of video streaming systems in the future. Employed in different system components, these techniques have the common objective of providing efficient, robust, scalable and low-latency streaming video. They range from purely server or source encoder-based techniques, through transmission schemes that could be implemented either at the sender or at the receiver, to purely client-based techniques. We discuss each of them in detail, presenting also related work and experimental results. We end the paper with a summary of the reviewed techniques and a brief discussion of future research directions. 1