MPEG-2 sources: exploiting source scalability for an efficient bandwidth allocation

The paper investigates efficient bandwidth allocation schemes for the trans mission of MPEG-2 video traffic on high-speed networks. To this end we perf ormed an extensive analysis of the traffic generated by an MPEG-2 encoder. Specifically, we encoded "The Sheltering Sky" movie according to the MPEG-2 standard. By the analysis of the generated traffic it results that a const ant-quality transmission can be performed with a poor bandwidth utilization . In the paper we identified that the low bandwidth utilization is caused b y rare high-rate periods in the codec bitstream. Hence, we identified the s ource scalability as a promising approach to achieve a "quasi-constant" qua lity transmission and an efficient bandwidth utilization. The effectiveness of this approach is evaluated in the paper via simulation. Specifically, b y defining a Markovian model for an MPEG-2 scalable source we performed a s et of simulation experiments which indicate that the source scalability app roach significantly increases the utilization, while maintaining the qualit y of the video signal at the highest value for most of the time, e.g., a 50 % of the network utilization with the highest quality for the 99.7% of the time.