Online traffic smoothing for delivery of variable bit rate media streams
Journal
Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing
Journal Volume
20
Journal Issue
3-4
Pages
341-359
Date Issued
2001
Author(s)
Abstract
Traffic smoothing for delivery of online variable bit rate (VBR) media streams is one of the most important problems in designing multimedia systems. Given an available client buffer, a window size, and a window-sliding size, previous window-based online smoothing methods have tried to reduce the peak bandwidth allocated in each window. However, as bandwidths allocated in different windows are minimized independently, these methods require a large peak bandwidth for transmitting an entire stream. In this paper, a new window-based method is proposed. It introduces two new ideas, the dynamic window-sliding size and the aggressive workahead, for delivery of online VBR media streams. Our aggressive and dynamic window sliding (ADWS) method can automatically decide on the suitable window-sliding sizes for different windows. Thus, the allocated peak bandwidth can be further reduced. By examining various media streams, ADWS is shown to be effective and efficient. Considering the online transmission of the movie Star Wars with a 90-kB client buffer, ADWS yields 13% less in peak bandwidth, compared with the bestknown window-based online smoothing algorithm SLWIN(1). Its computation cost (the window-sliding number) is 75% of that required by SLWIN(1).
Type
journal article