Traffic shaping for MPEG video transmission over the next generation internet

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has proposed the Guaranteed Serv ice (GS) in the Integrated Services model with firm delay and bandwidth gua rantees. In this paper, we study the effects of a token bucket traffic shap er at the source on the transmission characteristics of Motion Picture Expe rts Group (MPEG) compressed video streams over the GS. We develop an analyt ical model of the traffic shaper, and also carry out numerical simulation o f the transmission performance using MPEG trace data from several different video sequences. The analytical model and the numerical simulation results are in excellent agreement. Our study provides a technique to determine th e token bucket parameters that have to be specified while setting up a GS f low. Our study reveals that the traffic shaping process gives an end applic ation a wide range of flexibility in controlling the delay. By choosing app ropriate token bucket traffic shaper parameters, delay can be reduced signi ficantly without the need to reserve costly network resources for less dela y-sensitive applications, while time-critical applications may specify the required token bucket parameters for minimum delay. (C) 2000 Elsevier Scien ce B.V. All rights reserved.