Traffic shaping for MPEG video transmission over the next generation internet

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has proposed the Guaranteed Service (GS) in the Integrated Services model with firm delay and bandwidth guarantees. In this paper, we study the effects of a token bucket traffic shaper at the source on the transmission characteristics of Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) compressed video streams over the GS. We develop an analytical model of the traffic shaper, and also carry out numerical simulation of the transmission performance using MPEG trace data from several different video sequences. The analytical model and the numerical simulation results are in excellent agreement. Our study provides a technique to determine the token bucket parameters that have to be specified while setting up a GS flow. Our study reveals that the traffic shaping process gives an end application a wide range of flexibility in controlling the delay. By choosing appropriate token bucket traffic shaper parameters, delay can be reduced significantly without the need to reserve costly network resources for less delay-sensitive applications, while time-critical applications may specify the required token bucket parameters for minimum delay. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.