Distributed Streaming With Network Diversity

Abstract — 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. 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. Keywords- Collaborative media streaming; distributed streaming; media overlay networks; mesh networks; multi path. I