Data Dissemination in Mobile Environments

Abstract

Data dissemination today represents one of the cornerstones of network-based services and even more so for mobile environments. This becomes more important for large volumes of multimedia data such as video, which have the additional constraints of speedy, accurate, and isochronous delivery often to thousands of clients. In this chapter, we focus on video streaming with emphasis on the mobile environment, first outlining the related issues and then the most important of the existing proposals employing a simple but concise classification. New trends are included such as overlay and p2p network-based methods. The advantages and disadvantages for each proposal are also presented so that the reader can better appreciate their relative value.