Multimedia Streaming over the Internet

Multimedia streaming technology evolves in accordance with the growing needs of networked end-users for flexible and effective media delivery. The applicability of streaming media is further enhanced by the rapid evolution of the Internet. Our purpose is: (i) to review multimedia streaming technology with respect to the variety of multimedia applications, (ii) to assess the underlying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and limitations in order to evaluate the overall multimedia streaming performance and QoS under network heterogeneity, we investigate multimedia application requirements versus the QoS provided by the underlying network, focusing on those Internet functionalities and features that mostly influence multimedia streaming, such as its heterogeneity and its TCP protocol performance; and (iii) to finally discuss proposed solutions for efficient end-to-end QoS management of multimedia streaming applications over Internet we present a comparative survey of remarkable approaches and research proposals functioning both on the application and the network layer.