Media streaming with network diversity

Today's packet networks including the Internet offer an intrinsic diversity for media distribution in terms of available network paths and servers or information sources. Novel communication infrastructures such as ad hoc or wireless mesh networks use network diversity to extend their reach at low cost. Diversity can bring interesting benefits in supporting resource greedy applications such as media streaming services, by aggregation of bandwidth and computing resources. Typically, overlay network architectures compensate for lack of quality-of-service guarantees in the network by introducing redundancy in the media delivery system through network diversity. They can support efficient multimedia services when routing, coding, and scheduling algorithms are able to adapt to both the media information and the dynamic network status. This paper presents an overview of the distributed streaming solutions that profit from network diversity in order to improve the quality of multimedia applications. We discuss the coding techniques used for adaptive and flexible media streaming with network diversity. We describe the problem of media streaming with path diversity and focus on routing, path computation, and packet scheduling problems in multipath networks. Then, the advantages of server or source peer diversity in collaborative streaming solutions are discussed. Lastly, we present an overview of wireless mesh networks and focus on the typical constraints imposed by these novel communication models on media streaming with network diversity.