Video Streaming Considerations for Internet of Things

The Future Internet concept has received a great deal of attention in recent years. The topic has been approached by a variety of perspectives, and certainly standardization is still to be agreed upon regarding some of the new terms and concepts that have gained currency in this period. One widely discussed direction involves the expansion of the Internet’s model to include different forms of communications that may support connection to “things”, i.e. all sorts of resources with some form of connectivity, that can connect to the Internet. These are not necessarily the resources that have traditionally been associated with computing, such as hosts, servers, routers, and so on. Rather, these can be any type of appliance with some minimal computational capability. This scenario proposes a much more richly connected world, in which connectivity to all sorts of things has suggested the expression “Internet of Things”. Given the variety of functionality permitted to the networked resources, many mechanisms need to be investigated to suit different resource functionalities. As video data now accounts for over 50% of the Internet traffic, what are the considerations for video transmission, in real time, when the Internet of Things are incorporated? In this paper, we discuss some salient aspects, and consider specific recommendations for encoding based on the widely adopted ITU-T H264 standard. More specifically, we indicate how the high error rate associated with wireless communications channels, combined with the low computational capability of some of the networked resources, dictates different requirements and solutions for achieving acceptable quality of experience by the users.