Improving Live-Streaming Experience for Delay-Sensitive IoT Applications: A RESTful Approach

This paper presents a novel lightweight solution, “Adaptive RESTful Real-time Lightweight Streaming for Things (A-REaLiST)” to improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) for delay-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. It is particularly designed for applications which rely on real-time augmented vision based on live First Person View (FPV) feed from constrained remote agents like Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), etc. A-REaLiST ensures low-latency transfer of video and, despite transient losses, enables quick recovery from video freeze/corruption without incurring undue lag. A-REaLiST is an attempt to provide a solution for delay sensitive video streaming where the standard streaming solutions fail. It proposes new extensions to the Representational State Transfer (RESTful) semantics of Constrained Application-layer Protocol (CoAP) to enable efficient real-time streaming of time-series information (including video). Furthermore, A-REaLiST uses a unique integrated approach to maintain the balance amongst QoE, resource-efficiency and loss resilience based on contextual intelligence inferred from instantaneous information segment in flight. With its efficiency confirmed through benchmarking experiments, A-REaLiST reflects the promise to become a standard for streaming over CoAP based RESTful IoT infrastructure.