VBR video delivery using monotonic-decreasing rate scheduling

Variable-bit-rate (VBR) encoding is known to provide a more consistent visual quality compared to constant-bit-rate (CBR) encoding. However, the resultant bit-rate variations greatly complicated the allocation of disk and network bandwidth in a video-on-demand system. This paper investigates a new scheduling algorithm with monotonic-decreasing rate allocations for scheduling disk retrievals and data transmissions. This scheduler enables the use of a very computationally-efficient admission-control algorithm that can provide deterministic performance guarantee. Simulation results based on a large number of VBR video traces (307 DVD videos) show that the proposed scheduler can achieve over 84% disk efficiency despite long-range bit-rate variations within individual videos.