Streaming 3D meshes over thin mobile devices

We are witnessing a significant growth in applications using thin mobile devices, such as social networks, virtual walkthrough, massively multiplayer online gaming (MMOG), and augmented reality (AR), just to mention a few. Virtual environments (VE) based class of applications have recently attracted a large number of users. Applications that applied the conventional client-server architecture require the VE to be stored on the client, which is not very feasible due to the client´s memory constraints. To address this issue, 3D streaming techniques have been designed and are widely used nowadays. However, several challenges exist and affect the user´s Quality of Experience (QoE). By all means, these challenges need to be resolved before the 3D streaming technology over thin mobile devices becomes a commodity. In this paper, we provide a survey on the existing 3D streaming techniques by classifying them based on the nature of the application, and we centralize our attention on methods applied to adapt 3D streaming techniques to the changes in the wireless network conditions. Therefore, we discuss the challenges that the 3D streaming techniques face from a network point of view, as well as the approaches and solutions proposed.