Costs and benefits of fading for streaming media over wireless

In this tutorial article we discuss some salient aspects of the wireless channel, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for streaming media. Streaming media has a number of fundamental characteristics that differentiate it from generic data for which most wireless data transport protocols are designed. This means that solutions designed for media distribution in wired contexts do not directly translate into appropriate wireless solutions: designers must jointly optimize for both media and wireless characteristics. Through a number of examples we discuss how channel, source, and application-dependent concepts such as multiuser diversity, opportunistic communications, loss tolerance, and differing application-dependent delay constraints can be exploited to pose new and useful constructs for streaming media over wireless.