CBBS: A Content-Based Bandwidth Smoothing Scheme for Clustered Video Servers

Due to the inherent bandwidth burstness, variable-bit-rate (VBR) encoded videos are very difficult to be effectively transmitted over clustered video servers for achieving high server bandwidth utilization and efficiency while guaranteeing QoS. Previous bandwidth smoothing schemes tend to cause long initial delay, data loss and playback jitters. In this paper, we propose a content-based bandwidth smoothing scheme, called CBBS, which first splits video objects into lots of small segments based on the complexity of picture content in different visual scenes so that one segment is exactly including one visual scene, and then, for each segment, a constant bit rate is allocated to transfer it. Performance evaluation based on real-life MPEG-IV traces shows that CBBS scheme can significantly improve the server bandwidth utilization and efficiency, while the initial delay and client buffer occupancy are also significantly reduced.