Schedulable region for VBR media transmission with optimal resource allocation and utilization

Media data are VBR in nature due to the coding and compression technologies applied. As VBR streams are complicated for network management, different approaches were proposed to shape the VBR stream as a transmission schedule with smoothed traffic burst. In this paper, instead of giving a fixed schedule result, a novel traffic shaping scheme is proposed to decide a schedulable region for all optimal transmission schedules that provides the minimal allocation and maximal utilization of system resources (such as network bandwidth, initial delay and client buffer). Experiments shown that our obtained shaping results show dramatic improvements than that of conventional approaches in both the client buffer size and the network idle rate achieved. Based on the schedulable region provided, the ready time and deadline for each media packet can be precisely specified to support real-time network scheduling and error control. It allows users to determine their own optimal schedules under various QoS requirements and resource constraints.