Smoothing Variable-Bit-Rate Video in an Internetwork

The burstiness of compressed video complicates the provisioning of network resources for emerging multimedia services. For stored video applications, the server can smooth the variable-bit-rate stream by transmitting frames into the client playback buffer in advance of each burst. Drawing on prior knowledge of the frame lengths and client buffer size, such bandwidth smoothing techniques can minimize the peak and variability of the rate requirements while avoiding underflow and overflow of the playback buffer. However, in an internetworking environment, a single service provider typically does not control the entire path from the stored-video server to the client buffer. This paper presents efficient techniques for transmitting variable-bit-rate video across a portion of the route, from an ingress node to an egress node. We develop efficient techniques for minimizing the network bandwidth requirements by characterizing how the peak transmission rate varies as a function of the playback ..