M. Krunz et al., SCHEDULING AND BANDWIDTH ALLOCATION FOR THE DISTRIBUTION OF ARCHIVED VIDEO IN VOD SYSTEMS, Telecommunications systems, 9(3-4), 1998, pp. 335-355
Providing cost-effective video-on-demand (VOD) services necessitates r
educing the required bandwidth for transporting video over high-speed
networks. In this paper, we investigate efficient schemes for transpor
ting archived MPEG-coded video over a VOD distribution network. A vide
o stream is characterized by a time-varying traffic envelope, which pr
ovides an upper bound on the bit rate. Using such envelopes, we show t
hat video streams can be scheduled for transmission over the network s
uch that the per-stream allocated bandwidth is significantly less than
the source peak rate. In a previous work [13], we investigated stream
scheduling and bandwidth allocation using global traffic envelopes an
d homogeneous streams. In this paper, we generalize the scheduling sch
eme in [13] to include the heterogeneous case. We then investigate the
allocation problem under window-based traffic envelopes, which provid
e tight bounds on the bit rate. Using such envelopes, we introduce thr
ee stream-scheduling schemes for multiplexing video connections at a s
erver. The performance of these schemes is evaluated under static and
dynamic scenarios. Our results indicate a significant reduction in the
per-stream allocated bandwidth when stream scheduling is used. While
this reduction is obtained through statistical multiplexing, the trans
ported streams are guaranteed stringent, deterministic quality of serv
ice (i.e., zero loss rate and small, bounded delay). In contrast to vi
deo smoothing, our approach requires virtually no buffer at the set-to
p box since frames are delivered at their playback rate.