The transmission of MPEG‐2 VBR video under usage parameter control

Abstract

AbstractThis paper studies the transmission of MPEG‐2 VBR video over ATM network under usage parameter control. The idea is to seek a compromise between the network utilization and the quality of video service by applying UPC‐based rate control strategies to the video source. A modified leaky bucket algorithm is proposed to calculate the constraints on the bit‐rate guaranteeing conformance to peak cell rate, sustainable cell rate and burst tolerance usage parameters. Two rate control strategies, one for real‐time generated video coding and the other for pre‐compressed video, are proposed for MPEG‐2 VBR video. The rate control strategies control the video source to generate traffic conforming to the constraints on the bit rate. The experimental results show that both the UPC‐based rate control strategies can provide lossless transmission from the source perspective as well as to reduce the burstiness of the traffic. To keep within the bit‐rate allowed, the control method uses coarser quantization to maintain better picture quality than that by removing the number of AC transformed coefficients. The slight degradation of picture quality caused by the source rate control is preferable than the severe drop of picture quality caused by the cell loss at UPC. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.