CRITICAL BANDWIDTH ALLOCATION FOR THE DELIVERY OF COMPRESSED VIDEO

The transportation of compressed video data without loss of picture qu ality requires the network to support large fluctuations in bandwidth requirements. These fluctuations can be smoothed, but straightforward approaches to smoothing can still suffer from excessive buffering requ irements, poor buffer utilization and an excessive number of bandwidth changes. This paper introduces critical bandwidth allocation, which r educes the number of bandwidth changes to a very small number, and ach ieves the maximum effectiveness from client-side buffers. A comparison between critical bandwidth allocation algorithms and other smoothing algorithms is presented, the sensitivity of the algorithm to jitter is examined, and, implications for the design of network services are di scussed.