Video forwarding techniques for mixed wired and wireless networks

During the last years, Internet video streaming has experiences a phenomenal growth. This is happening despite the notorious difficulties of transmitting data packets with a deadline over the Internet, due to variability in throughput, delays and losses. These problems arise significantly when using wireless networks where the available bandwidth is low and the losses are important due to its error prone transmission nature. In this paper we propose a fast-forwarding technique that is based on segmenting the movie on different files. Normal movie reproduction requires all the files, but fast-forwarding reproduction only requires one file. Those files can me merged by the client or by the server. The segmentation is frame based, grouping all the frames that can be independently decoded together. The resulting file can be showed with any existing player. This group of frames would be the ones to use in a fast-forward reproduction. Our techniques can also be useful in adaptive environments, like wireless networks, because there is no problem for the fast-forward file to use the same optimizations that exist for full movie files. This method also reduces the storage bandwidth and the storage size needed (there is no extra data for fast-forwarding). We also propose a video server architecture that takes advantage of this technique to achieve full interactive video reproduction. The evaluation results shown in this paper demonstrates that our technique enhances video fast-forwarding operations.