PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF CELL DISCARDING MECHANISMS FOR THE DISTRIBUTION OF VBR MPEG-2 VIDEO OVER ATM NETWORKS

ATM networks promise to provide the means to support a wide range of a pplications exhibiting different traffic characteristics and performan ce requirements. Video communications have been recognized as one of t he most demanding applications to be supported by ATM networks. This i s mainly due to the need of transferring large amounts of darn and the strict timing requirements characterizing digital video applications. In this paper, simulation experiments are conducted to study the perf ormance of the different cell discarding control mechanisms, in terms of quality of service, when used in an ATM network supporting hierarch ical encoded VBR MPEG-2 video distribution. Our results show the effec tiveness of the control schemes in reducing the cell loss rates as com pared to the system configuration without no cell discarding scheme in place.