language: en

Smoothing and Multiplexing Tradeoffs for Deterministic Performance Guarantees to VBR Video

Edward W. Knightly and Paola Rossaro
Also with EECS Department, U.C. Berkeley
TR-95-033

Abstract The burstiness of variable bit rate traffic makes it difficult to both efficiently utilize network resources and provide end-to-end network performance guarantees to the traffic sources. Generally, smoothing or shaping traffic sources at the entrance of the network reduces their burstiness to allow higher utilization within the network. However, this buffering introduces an additional delay so that, in effect, lossless smoothing trades queueing delay inside the network for smoothing delay at the network edge. In this paper, we consider the net effect of smoothing on end-to-end performance guarantees where a no-loss, no-delay-violation deterministic guarantee is provided with the D-BIND traffic model. We analytically quantify these tradeoffs and provide a set of general rules for determining under which conditions smoothing provides a net gain. We also empirically investigate these tradeoffs using traces of MPEG compressed video.