Application rate adaptation for mobile streaming

As the adoption of 2.5G and 3G systems grows, multimedia streaming is one of the services that operators will increasingly seek to provide. The multimedia streaming solutions that have successfully been deployed commercially on the Internet in the past are all based on proprietary technologies. However, existing streaming applications need to be considerably rethought to work well over wireless. The 3GPP standardization body has standardized streaming services for Release 4, 5 and 6 specifications. The Release 6 advanced streaming service overcomes the technical challenges posed by wireless and best effort networks. A standard solution for advanced multimedia streaming will ultimately drive adoption by operators and users. The paper describes the solution standardized in 3GPP(2) for adaptive streaming.