Video Streaming: H.264 and the Internet of Things

Video data has been growing in importance over the last decade, and it is expected to exceed all other forms of networked data in for some time. This is also the case for the specific scenario of mobile data, where more than 60% of traffic globally will be video data. As the future Internet will encompass traffic from the Internet of Things, including low power personal devices in low quality media networks, any real time video data with source or destination in such a network will need to be encoded accordingly. In this paper we consider a few encoding options from the H.264 standard with the aim of analysing their suitability for encoding IoT related video data. We discuss the relative benefits of single layer (non-scalable) and scalable video encoders and make recommendations based on the limited capabilities of the IoT devices and transmission channels.