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 videos are known to exhibit significant, multiple-time-scale bit rate variability. To such bursty traffic, it is always a compromise between providing a good quality of service (QoS) and a high utilization on the reserved bandwidth. One can utilize an optimal video smoothing algorithm as suggested in Salehi et al. (1996) to smooth out the data transmission from a server to a client so that the bandwidth utilization can be improved. However, such smoothing techniques concentrate their efforts on smoothing the transmission and worry less about resource requirements, maximum bandwidth needed and the overall bandwidth utilization. In this paper, we present a smoothing algorithm 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 without sacrificing much on the video quality.