Impact of ATM cell delay on multimedia applications

  • Authors:
  • H. -K. Tan;R. Radhakrishna Pillai;C. -K. Tham;L. Wong;J. Biswas

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore 119260;Kent Ridge Digital Labs, 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore, Singapore 119613;Department of Electrical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore 119260;Department of Electrical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore 119260;Kent Ridge Digital Labs, 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore, Singapore 119613

  • Venue:
  • Computer Communications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

The impact of ATM cell delays on multimedia application performance is studied through measurements using a broadband network analyser. A method is developed to measure the ATM cell delays of an application using the analyser. It is found that the cell delay distribution becomes continuous as the traffic load on a connection becomes lighter. The effect of background traffic on cell delay for a reference connection is studied. Though the cell delay of the reference connection is unaffected by the presence of background traffic, the cell-delay auto-correlation is found to decrease. A gamma distribution is used to approximate the cell delay distribution. The measurement results closely match the delay prediction using the approximation. In a network with multiple ATM switches, the gamma distribution only slightly overestimates the delay. The frame level statistics and the cell delay performance of a video conferencing application based on motion JPEG are measured. Using the gamma cell delay distribution, the frame loss of an MPEG-I video source is predicted and compared against the measured values based on MPEG-I traces.