Streaming technology (Telecommunications)

Digital music streaming websites have taken over the musical landscape. While
the digital music market is booming, both data and time have revealed that the current
system as it exists will not provide a sustainable future for creators of content or for
technology companies. Although some consumers are willing to pay for content they can access for free, many are still enjoying content without paying. Both the technology
companies and creators of content have sacrificed to meet consumer demands, but the
technology companies have been too willing to make creators of content be the ones
paying for ‘free.’ Recent legislative efforts have provided a good start to balancing a system that is clearly in distress, but there is still much be done to move the music industry forward. This paper examines the current issues facing the digital music streaming industry and several legislative and industry-prompted efforts in current discussion.

This thesis presents the simulation based performance evaluation on the transmission of multimedia services (H.264/AVC video streaming) to a mobile user over a packet-switched wireless network based on the WCDMA standard. The H.264/AVC refers to the codec, which is used as the main tool for video compression. It enables the transport of high bandwidth video data over Third Generation (3G) wireless systems by offering a high video compression rate, adaptability to the channel, and error resilience. It is transported using the RTP/UDP/IP protocol stack over the 3G wireless system. The WCDMA technology is simulated with special emphasis on the upper layers of the wireless channel. The performance of the WCDMA system is studied when transporting RTP/UDP/IP packets of H.264/AVC compressed video data under diverse configuration scenarios, namely, ARQ schemes and variable length of the transmitted frame at the link layer. These components of a packet-switched streaming service are integrated into a software simulation model, which is used to evaluate the end-to-end H.264/AVC video quality in a WCDMA wireless network.