Effect of Buffer Placement on Performance When Communicating Over a Rate-Variable Channel

We compare the performance of two real-time multimedia communication systems for quality versus end-to-end delay. We develop an analytical framework for comparison when the systems use a deterministic time-varying channel. Moreover, we assess their performance for the Gilbert-Elliott channel model which alternates between a good and a bad state with time durations that are exponentially distributed.The goal of the paper is to select the best system with low average distortion while obeying a real-time constraint.