wiki:GEC16Agenda/WiMAX-Tutorial/Streamload/00

Version 4 (modified by Fraida Fund, 11 years ago) (diff)

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Background

This tutorial experiment is based on:

  1. Rath, S. Goyal, and S. Panwar, "Streamloading: Low Cost High Quality Video Streaming for Mobile Users," in Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Mobile Video (MoVid '13), ACM, 26 February – 1 March, Oslo, Norway.

A copy of this work can be found here (pdf).

The Idea

Some Internet video content is only available for streaming: the receiver downloads a small part of the video at a time, and the entire video is never saved on the device. However, the quality of the streaming video quickly drops when the receiver moves into an area with a poor signal. Downloaded videos do not suffer from this problem, but is often not available due to potential content provider licensing restrictions.

Streamload is a protocol for sending layered video over cellular networks that combines the benefits of streaming and downloading.

  • Downloaded video can be of very high quality. Since content is downloaded to the device, viewing the video does not require an active Internet connection. However, some video content is not available for downloading due to content provider licensing restrictions.
  • Streaming video requires that the user has a reliable Internet connection. In streaming video, the receiver downloads a small part of the video at a time, and the entire video is never saved on the device. The quality of the streaming video quickly drops when the receiver moves into an area with a poor signal.

In streamload, the base layer of the video is streamed in real time, and enhancement layers may be downloaded ahead of time. The video quality is improved because the receiver can take advantage of available bandwidth to download enhancement layers of future chunks of video, "smoothing" the effect of variations in signal quality. However, the legal requirements of streaming are satisfied because the video that is downloaded to the device cannot be played without the base layer (which is streamed).