Video modeling within networks using deterministic smoothing at the source

Video traffic is expected to become increasingly important with the large scale deployment of broadband ISDN. In the literature, it suggested that smoothing variable bit rate (VBR) video traffic before transmitting it onto the network would help reduce the probability of packet loss. The authors show why deterministic smoothing at the source approximates the minimum achievable loss over the network end-to-end of all possible smoothing schemes. Furthermore, they develop a powerful yet simple analytical technique that can efficiently calculate the loss probability at any point in a network carrying video traffic. They validate the analytical results using traces of actual video segments. The results can be used for admission control and traffic management. They find that in the case of highly correlated traffic such as video, the way to control loss is to ensure that the fraction of time the arrival process exceeds the service process is small