Enterprise Streaming: Different Challenges from Internet Streaming

Media streaming over the best-effort public Internet has been a focus of research for over a decade. Enterprise or corporate streaming is another area of media streaming that is practically very important and has a different set of challenges and feasible solutions. For example, the quality and reliability requirements for enterprise streaming are much stricter than for typical Internet streaming. Furthermore, in typical enterprise streaming scenarios, a single entity has control over most elements of the system, including the end-points and the infrastructure. This entity has the powerful ability to monitor, adapt, and deploy new infrastructure as necessary. The goal of this paper is to describe enterprise streaming and identify the basic differences between typical Internet streaming and enterprise streaming, and how these differences alter the challenges that must be overcome for enterprise streaming to be successful. Specifically, we examine enterprise streaming media content delivery network design and operation, video conferencing, peer-to-peer networking (P2P), voice over IP (VoIP), and briefly touch upon wireless and security issues