Basic Video Streaming Problems Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Basic Video Streaming Problems - Essay Example However, there are several drawbacks related to the concept of video streaming. Video streaming has its limitations on the internet because internet does not give any surety of any fixed bandwidth, delay or packet loss. It works on a â€Å"best effort service† (Apostolopoulos et al. 2002). These are considered to be variable factors that change with respect to the quality of internet connection. There have been many researches carried out over the years to induce more reliability and consistency in video streaming. These three issues are discussed in detail: As stated earlier, the bandwidth between two nodes is variable and might not be known. This variability causes problems in the traffic flow from one point to the other (Wu et al. 2001). If the sender sends data at a rate which is faster than the available bandwidth then congestion and low quality streaming is resulted. On the contrary, if the sender sends data at a rate which is slower than the available bandwidth then the receiver decodes a sub-optimal video quality (Apostolopoulos et al. 2002). A strategy to overcome this problem is to ensure a bandwidth that is acceptable to both the nodes; this can be done by estimating the available bandwidth and striking a balance between the estimated bandwidth and video bit rate transferred over the link. The degree of this issue varies from packet to packet. The variation in the delay of every packet depends on its respective queues on different routers. If there exist some variations in the end-to-end delays then it is known as delay jitter (Apostolopoulos et al. 2002). The main reason behind this problem lies in the fact that the receiver is designed to decode and thus display frames at a certain rate. Some frames may arrive at the receiver late due to this delay jitter; this can create a problem at the receiver because he is programmed to decode the frames at a certain rate. These late frames will cause jerks in the display of