Co-operative media streaming in mobile environments

Media streaming in mobile environments is becoming more and more important with the proliferation of 3G technologies and the popularity of online media services such as news clips, live sports, and movies. To avoid disconnection and/or service breakdown when the users keep moving, proper data management strategies must be taken by all parties. We propose a two-level framework and a set of new techniques for cooperative media streaming in mobile environments. Headlight prefetching is designed for the cooperation of streaming access points to deal with the uncertainty of client movement and the requirement of seamless service handoff. Dynamic chaining is for the cooperation among mobile users to maximize cache utilization and streaming benefit. On receiving a media segment request from a mobile client, the streaming access point starts a search for possible supplying partners before attempting to a remote media server.