A reserved bandwidth video smoothing algorithm for MPEG transmission

MPEG video transmission will make up a significant portion of the workload on future computer networks. These variable bit rate (VBR) compressed video s are known to exhibit significant, multiple-time-scale bit rate variabilit y. To such bursty traffic, it is always a compromise between providing a go od quality of service (QoS) and a high utilization on the reserved bandwidt h. One can utilize an optimal video smoothing algorithm as suggested in Sal ehi et al. (1996) to smooth out the data transmission from a server to a cl ient so that the bandwidth utilization can be improved. However, such smoot hing techniques concentrate their efforts on smoothing the transmission and worry less about resource requirements, maximum bandwidth needed and the o verall bandwidth utilization. In this paper, we present a smoothing algorit hm for transmitting stored MPEG-I video stream under a user-defined maximum network bandwidth. We also consider the impact of the startup latency, and the client's buffer size on the network utilization. Our algorithm differs from the others in that we do video smoothing under a pre-defined reserved bandwidth. At the cost of deleting some B-frames within a short period of time, the reserved bandwidth utilization can be improved dramatically witho ut sacrificing much on the video quality. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. Al l rights reserved.