Guest Editorial Video Distribution Over Future Internet

THE CURRENT Internet is under tremendous pressure due to the exponential growth in bandwidth demand, fueled by the transfer of video consumption to online distribution, IPTV, streaming services such as Netflix, and from phone networks to videoconferencing and Skype-like video communications. The Internet has also democratized the creation, distribution and sharing of user-generated video contents through services such as YouTube, Vimeo or Hulu. The situation is further aggravated by the emerging trends of adopting higher definition video streams, requesting more and more bandwidth. Indeed, the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) projects that video consumption will amount to 90% of the global consumer traffic by 2017. Another shift predicted by Cisco VNI is that most data communications will be wireless by 2018. To cope with the bandwidth growth, the shift to wireless, and to solve other related issues (e.g., naming, security, etc) with the current Internet, new architectures for the future Internet have been proposed and prototyped. Examples include Content-Centric Networks (CCN) or Named Data Networking (NDN), or some content-based extensions to Software-Defined Networking (SDN), among others. None of these emerging architectures deal specifically with video distribution, as they need to support a wider range of services, but all would have to support videos in an efficient manner. Therefore, the study of video distribution over the future Internet is of primary importance and raises many questions: how well does the future Internet architecture facilitate video delivery? What new video distribution mechanisms need to be created to run on the future Internet? How will video be supported in the wireless portion of the future Internet? Can the current video distribution mechanisms (such as end-to-end dynamic rate adaptation schemes) be used or even enhanced for the future Internet? What are subjective/ objective metrics for performance measurement? How to provide real-time guarantees for live and interactive video streams? While the topic is quite wide, we will narrow the focus of this special issue on the fundamental problems of video