A Comparison of Bandwidth Smoothing Techniques for the Transmission of Prerecorded Compress.pdf

A Comparison of Bandwidth Smoothing Techniques for the Transmission of Prerecorded Compressed Video Wu-chi Feng Dept. of Comp. and Info. Sci. The Ohio State University Columbus, OH 43210 wuchi@ Jennifer Rexford Networking and Distributed Systems ATT Labs Research Murray Hill, NJ 07974 jrex@ Abstract The transfer of prerecorded, compressed video requires multimedia services to support large fluctuations in band- width requirements on multiple time scales. Bandwidth smoothing techniques can reduce the burstiness of a vari- able-bit-rate stream by prefetching data at a series of fixed rates, simplifying the allocation of resources in video serv- ers and the communication network. Given a fixed client- side prefetch buffer, several bandwidth smoothing algo- rithms have been introduced that are provably optimal under certain constraints. This paper presents a collection of metrics for comparing these smoothing algorithms and evaluating their cost-performance trade-offs. Due to the scarcity of available trace data, we have constructed a video capture testbed and generated a collection of twenty full-length, motion-JPEG encoded video clips. Using these video traces and a range of client buffer sizes, we investi- gate the interplay between the performance metrics through simulation experiments. The results highlight the unique strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm. 1. Introduction Many emerging multimedia applications, such as digital libraries and video-on-demand services, rely on the effi- cient transfer of prerecorded video. Effective compression techniques, such as MPEG [1] and motion-JPEG, can sub- stantially reduce the resource requirements for storing and transmitting video streams. However, compressed video traffic typically exhibits significant burstiness on multiple time scales, due to the frame structure of the compression algorithm as well as natural variations within and between scenes[2-4]. This bursty, variable-bit-rate traffic compli- cates the effort