An Elastic Traffic Policer for MPEG Video Streams

Multimedia applications like MPEG-2 video produce packets with multiple levels of importance from application quality point of view. We propose a traffic policing mechanism for such applications, called elastic policing, which provides more flexibility to more important packets. We describe a token bucket based implementation of elastic policing using additional "loan buckets", and verify its performance by simulation studies. We observe significant improvement in objective video quality without increasing traffic admitted into the network in the long term