Adaptive bandwidth allocation based on playback tunnel to support video on demand service over ATM networks

Abstract

This paper focuses on adaptive bandwidth allocation (ABA) for transporting pre-stored VBR compressed video data across networks in support of video-on-demand (VoD) service. Two key issues are addressed. Firstly, a simplified dynamic programming method based on playback tunnel is proposed to predict the bandwidth which can be dynamically allocated for transporting video segment to guarantee that the playback buffer neither underflows nor overflows. Secondly, ABA schemes with different criteria including middle-tunnel ABA (MT-ABA) and reduced-bandwidth-variability ABA (RBV-ABA) are investigated. The proposed ABA schemes are evaluated by a set of real-life MPEG video traces. The obtained results show that the RBV-ABA scheme outperforms MT-ABA scheme in terms of peak rate, traffic burstiness and bandwidth variability. On the other hand, the MT-ABA scheme is more significant for avoiding the playback buffer overflow or underflow than that of RBV-ABA.