Video traffic characterization for multimedia networks with a deterministic service

One of the most important traffic types in future packet-switched networks is high-bandwidth, variable-bit-rate (VBR) video. Since video is a delay-sensitive media, the network must allocate resources to maintain quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees on throughput, delay, and delay jitter to video connections. A key component of resource allocation is the traffic characterization of video sources that determines the resources required to support video connections. In this study, we propose a method for characterizing VBR video traffic with a fixed number of leaky buckets in networks with a deterministic service. We explore tradeoffs of network utilization in two directions: (1) the number of leaky buckets used for traffic characterisation, and (2) the amount of information from a video sequence used to produce the characterization. We evaluate our method with a set of 30-minute long MPEG-compressed video traces.