A Survey on Virtual Network Functions for Media Streaming: Solutions and Future Challenges

Abstract

Media services must ensure an enhanced user’s perceived quality during content playback to attract and retain audiences, especially while the streams are distributed remotely via networks. Thus, media streaming services rely heavily on good and predictable network performance when delivered to a large number of people. Furthermore, as the quality of media content gets high, the network performance demands are also increasing, and meeting them is challenging. Network functions devoted to improving media streaming services become essential to cope with the high dynamics of network performance and user mobility. Furthermore, new networking paradigms and architectures under the 5G networks umbrella are bringing new possibilities to deploy smart network functions, which monitor the media streaming services through live and objective metrics and boost them in real-time. This survey overviews the state-of-the-art technologies and solutions proposed to apply new network functions for enhancing media streaming.