An integrated admission control scheme for the delivery of streaming media
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
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Abstract: In Video-on-Demand (VoD) systems, using the entire frame-size sequence for each video stream, the VoD service provider can derive a video transport schedule which will cause neither buffer overflow nor buffer starvation without requiring excessive amounts of network bandwidth and buffer space. Specifically, such a transport schedule uses temporal averaging to reduce the rate variability of a video stream. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient VBR VoD-stream transport mechanism called the Play-Back Rate Transport with Minimum Rate Guaranteed (PBRT-MRG), which exploits statistical multiplexing as well as temporal averaging. The proposed scheme provides statistical loss guarantees - instead of absolute loss-freedom guarantees - to maximize network utilization. Temporal averaging is done through buffering both at the server and at receivers. To exploit the advantages of statistical multiplexing, a set of VoD streams are multiplexed onto a common transport channel. For the aggregated video streams which are averaged temporally and spatially, we present a simple transport mechanism and a call-admission scheme both of which together provide statistical loss guarantees. Our empirical study shows that one can provide a VoD service without requiring any complex control while achieving high bandwidth/buffer utilization at a reasonable build-up delay. In one case, the proposed scheme is shown to save buffer requirement by as much as three orders of magnitude for the same bandwidth usage.