Experimental evaluation of VBR transport over optical burst switching network

Variable bit rate (VBR) compressed video targeted at constant video quality is also known to exhibit significant and multiple-time-scale rate variabilities. The burstiness of such a compressed VBR video complicates the management and provisioning of network resources for ever increasing multimedia services. In a heterogeneous internetworking environment, a single service provider typically doesn´t control the entire path from multimedia streaming server to the client buffer. In this paper we analyze bit rate variabilities exhibited by scalable video coding (SVC) encoded VBR stream and present optical burst switching (OBS) network as a mechanism for VBR transport across the core network. In our experimental evaluation we use OBS inherent bursitification feature at the edge node and evaluate its effectiveness towards smoothing and transport of VBR video stream. SVC encoded VBR video is transported over OBS test bed and OBS burst assembly parameters like time threshold and offset time are tuned for a smooth transport of SVC encoded VBR video stream. Experimental results reveal that for a proper burst assembly time, OBS transported VBR video stream has low inter-frame time intervals as well as a high peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR).