On-Demand Media Streaming on the Internet: Trends and Issues
Anirban Mahanti · 2001
Recent years have seen significant deployment of multimedia applications. In many of these applications, stored media files are delivered on-demand, as for example in video-on-demand systems. Such applications require high bandwidth, and are sensitive to loss and delay. The current "best effort" Internet, however, does not provide any quality of service (QoS) guarantees, thus posing several impediments. This paper presents a survey of the current research efforts towards effective on-demand media streaming, focusing on server design issues, network infrastructure support, and application-level QoS support. The key topics covered include standardization efforts, multicast service models, stream merging, rate control, and caching. The paper concludes with a brief summary of the important results, and a few pointers for future work.