Video streaming distribution over mobile Internet: a survey

In recent times, mobile Internet has witnessed the explosive growth of video applications, embracing user-generated content, Internet Protocol television (IPTV), live streaming, video-on-demand, video conferencing, and FaceTime-like video communications. The exponential rise of video traffic and dynamic user behaviors have proved to be a major challenge to video resource sharing and delivery in the mobile environment. In this article, we present a survey of state-of-the-art video distribution solutions over the Internet. We first discuss the challenges of mobile peer-to-peer (MP2P)-based solutions and categorize them into two groups. We discuss the design idea, characteristics, and drawbacks of solutions in each group. We also give a review for solutions of video transmission in wireless heterogeneous networks. Furthermore, we summarize the information-centric networking (ICN)-based video solutions in terms of in-network caching and name-based routing. Finally, we outline the open issues for mobile video systems that require further studies.