Performance evaluation of cell discarding mechanisms for hierarchical VBR MPEG-2 video traffic over ATM networks

Different performance studies have been made in the literature with cell discarding mechanism using analytical traffic models. The performance of these discarding schemes is strongly affected by the traffic model used. Hence, it is very important to study the performance of cell discarding mechanisms using real traffic statistics. In this paper simulation experiments are conducted to study the performance of the different cell discarding mechanisms, in terms of QoS, when used in an ATM switch supporting hierarchical encoded VBR MPEG-2 video traffic, from a number of independent video sources. Moreover, we explore how the temporal properties of this video traffic, and in particular the alignments between different sources affect network performance when many video traffic streams are multiplexed onto a single channel.