State of the Art on Video Streaming and Applications

The real-time and live video streaming are playing an important role in our daily lives; therefore enhancing the quality of real-time and live video streaming over wired and wireless packet erasure networks which becomes more and more important topic nowadays. The main objective of this tutorial paper is to highlight state of the art on video streaming and the most important methods for enhancing video streaming over wired and wireless packet erasure networks to the computer/communication engineering students and new researchers. Firstly, it presents an overview of layered coding compression techniques (like: H.264/SVC) which lead to better real-time video streaming quality than single layer coding techniques (like: H.264/AVC). Secondly, it highlights how to solve the channel errors and lost packets problems in video streaming via implementing some of Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques. Furthermore, it presents Backward Error Correction (BEC) techniques for enhancing the video streaming. After that it talks about the implementation of rateless FEC techniques with feedback for solving the real-time and live video streaming issues. Then it presents some recent researches on the Unequal Error (or Loss) Protection (UEP) techniques which are more powerful and achieve better Peak Signal to Noise Rate (PSNR) than the previous Equal Error Protection (EEP) techniques. Also it highlights the adaptive UEP scheme which brings significant improvements in terms of average PSNR over static UEP scheme for same used bandwidth. Furthermore, it talks about the multipath video streaming which leads to better loss characteristics and better load distribution on wireless networks than the single path video streaming. Finally, it presents some recent researches that based on hybrid solution of rateless FEC and advanced BEC techniques for enhancing the real-time and live video streaming quality over 3G, Wi-Fi and WiMAX wireless networks.