Soft Delivery: Survey on a New Paradigm for Wireless and Mobile Multimedia Streaming

The increasing demand for video streaming services is the key driver of modern wireless and mobile communications. Although many studies have designed digital-based delivery schemes to send video content over wireless and mobile networks, significant quality degradation, known as cliff and leveling effects, often occurs owing to fluctuating channel characteristics. In this article, we present a comprehensive summary of soft delivery, which is a new paradigm for wireless and mobile video streaming and discuss the future directions of soft delivery. Existing studies found that introducing multi-dimensional cosine transform, human vision system, and graph signal processing can make soft delivery schemes more effective in untethered immersive experiences, including virtual reality and volumetric media, than digital-based delivery schemes. In addition, this study finds that soft delivery has the potential to be a new standard to deliver deep neural network models and tactile information over wireless and mobile networks.