Performance analysis of transmission schemes for VBR traffic on a real-time network

The growth of real-time networks and parallel and distributed algorithms has accelerated the progress in distributed multimedia applications. These applications usually involve the transmission of digital videos over a real-time network. Because of the size of the video, most video data needs to be compressed before being transmitted. Among all the compression schemes, the MPEG standard is most notable. Hence, there is a need to investigate the transmission schemes tailored for handling variable bit rate (VBR) traffic over a real-time network. Needing to choose a typical real-time network for our transmission experiments, we chose the timed token medium access control protocol for our evaluation because of its acceptance in the real-time communication community. In this paper, we propose four different transmission schemes for real-time VBR traffic. With analysis and intensive simulation, the results reveal that in our best scenario, the performance improvement can be as high as 422% over the original default transmission scheme.