Burst handling of digital video traffic

Abstract

Digital video traffic is inherently bursty for two reasons: the inherent motion of the objects and cameras, and artifacts of the compression algorithms. Because digital video playback requires bandwidth guarantees from the underlying I/O and network systems, the bursty nature of video traffic forces bandwidth reservations to be made at the level of the peak data rates rather than at the average data rates. This paper addresses the burstiness problem in digital video traffic by proposing changes to the MPEG compression/decompression algorithm. The resulting algorithm, called block-by-block (BBB) difference coding, successfully minimizes the difference between peak and average bit rates by a factor of 2 to 3 on average, without compromising the compression efficiency, coding speed and video quality.