An Efficient and Scalable Smoothing Algorithm of VBR Streams

Abstract

In order to obtain better video quality, media files are required to use variable-bit-rate (VBR) encoding. However, it produces traffic burst and unbalanced resource utilizations to translate VBR-encoded video. In this paper, we propose a novel bandwidth smoothing algorithm, buffer sharing and bandwidth smoothing of VBR streams (BSBS-VBR), which combines with prefetching and interval caching, allows video server to transmit a VBR-encoded stream at a fixed rate and makes users to share a disk stream. BSBS-VBR can also allocate and adjust buffer size dynamically according to the current request distribution and available resources. It can reduce the peak requirements of disk bandwidth and network bandwidth, improve utility of the resources, and serve more users by using this algorithm. These conclusions are proved by comparing with several existing methods experimentally.