An Experimental Delay Analysis Based on M/G/1-Vacation Queues for Local Audio/Video Streams

Abstract

The delay which is one of the quality of service parameters is considered to be a crucial factor for the effective usage of real-time audio and video streams in interactive multimedia collaborations. Among the various causes of the delay, we focus in this paper on the local delay concerned with the schemes which handle continuous inflow of encoded data from constant or variable bit-rate audio and video encoders. We introduce two kinds of implementation approaches, pull model and push model. While the pull model periodically pumps out the incoming data from the system buffer, the push model receives events from the device drivers. From our experiments based on Windows NT 3.51, it is shown that the push model outperforms the other for both constant and variable bit-rate streams in terms of the local delay, when the system suffers reasonable loads. We interpret this experimental data with M/G/1 multiple vacation queuing theories, and show that it is consistent with the queuing theoretic interpretations.