Hardware accelerated estimation of multiplexer-introduced loss for MPEG-4 data streams

As MPEG-4 uses objects to compose scenes, and each object is transmitted using one or more data streams (e.g. for audio, video base, and video enhancement layers) the network overhead for a single service can be very high. MPEG-4 systems specify a multiplexing tool to reduce the network overhead. This multiplexer can drop frames if the frame deadlines and the network channel QoS make timely transmission impossible. The need to estimate the loss introduced by the multiplexer arises, even more so since MPEG-4 objects appear and disappear at random times, which increases the dynamics of the output traffic specification and QoS re-negotiations. We present a hardware implementation of an approach based on statistical models of the data streams and Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the loss introduced by the multiplexer. The estimator can be used to determine the required network QoS at any time during a MPEG-4 session. A prototype was developed with the Dice codesign environment and the Replica emulation platform