CHARACTERIZING HIGHLY CORRELATED VIDEO TRAFFIC IN HIGH-SPEED ASYNCHRONOUS TRANSFER MODE NETWORKS

The enormous bandwidth potential of optical fiber has resulted in a wo rldwide effort to develop high-speed ATM networks, also called broadba nd integrated services digital networks (BISDN). Many of the applicati ons that ATM networks will support will have a strong video component to them. Hence, it is important to understand the behavior of video tr affic as ii travels through these networks. To that end, we develop th e generalized histogram model (GHM) to characterize ''highly correlate d'' traffic, such as motion JPEG or ''smoothed'' MPEG traffic over ATM networks end-to-end. Using our GHM model we show how to determine the loss rate at any node in an ATM network. We find that, for highly cor related video sources, increasing the buffer size beyond a certain reg ion called the ''cell region'' only marginally decreases the probabili ty of loss. This implies that large buffers cannot be used to control the loss for such sources. The analytical model provided in this paper can be used for admission control, and network dimensioning and desig n in ATM networks. We have validated our results using simulations of real traces of video sources. (C) 1996 SPIE and IS&T.