Adapting Multimedia Streaming to Changing Network Conditions

Providing a satisfactory multimedia service in networking environments requires an effective media delivery mechanism. However, the Internet does not provide a guaranteed network bandwidth to accommodate multimedia service in a reliable fashion. The Internet is a heterogeneous networking environment, in which resources available to multimedia applications are changing. In the last decade, the research community has proposed both networking techniques and application layer techniques, which adapt to the changes in network conditions. This chapter focuses on the application level techniques, including methods based on compression algorithm features, layered encoding, rate shaping, adaptive error control, and smoothing. The chapter also discusses operating system methods to support adaptive multimedia.