Exploiting the temporal structure of MPEG video for the reduction of bandwidth requirements

We present a novel bandwidth allocation scheme for transporting variable-bit-rate MPEG traffic from a video server. Using time-varying envelopes to characterize the traffic, this scheme achieves significant bandwidth gain, via statistical multiplexing, while supporting stringent, deterministic QoS guarantees. The gain can be maximized by allowing the server to appropriately schedule the starting times of video sources, at the expense of some negligible startup delay. For homogeneous streams, we give the optimal schedule that results in the minimum allocated bandwidth. A suboptimal schedule is given in the heterogeneous case, which is shown to be asymptotically optimal. Efficient online procedures for bandwidth computation are provided. Numerical examples based on traces of MPEG-coded movies are used to demonstrate the benefits of our allocation strategy