High Speed Video Transmission for Telemedicine using ATM Technology

In this paper, we study statistical multiplexing of VBR video in ATM networks. ATM promises to provide high speed realtime multi-point to central video transmission for telemedicine applications in rural hospitals and in emergency medical services. Video coders are known to produce variable bit rate (VBR) signals and the effects of aggregating these VBR signals need to be determined in order to design a telemedicine network infrastructure capable of carrying these signals. We first model the VBR video signal and simulate it using a generic continuous-data autoregressive (AR) scheme. We carry out the queueing analysis by the Fluid Approximation Model (FAM) and the Markov Modulated Poisson Process (MMPP). The study has shown a trade off: multiplexing VBR signals reduces burstiness and improves resource utilization, however, the buffer size needs to be increased with an associated economic cost. We also show that the MMPP model and the Fluid Approximation model fit best, respectively, the cell region and the burst region. Therefore, a hybrid MMPP and FAM completely characterizes the overall performance of the ATM statistical multiplexer. The ramifications of this technology are clear: speed, reliability (lower loss rate and jitter), and increased capacity in video transmission for telemedicine. With migration to full IP-based networks still a long way to achieving both high speed and high quality of service, the proposed ATM architecture will remain of significant use for telemedicine.

Modeling of Statistically Multiplexed Non Uniform Activity VBR Video

This paper reports the feasibility of the ARMA model to describe a bursty video source transmitting over a AAL5 ATM link (VBR traffic). The traffic represents the activity of the action movie "Lethal Weapon 3" transmitted over the ATM network using the Fore System AVA-200 ATM video codec with a peak rate of 100 Mbps and a frame rate of 25. The model parameters were estimated for a single video source and independently multiplexed video sources. It was found that the model ARMA (2, 4) is well-suited for the real data in terms of average rate traffic profile, probability density function, autocorrelation function, burstiness measure, and the pole-zero distribution of the filter model.

Burstiness Reduction of a Doubly Stochastic AR-Modeled Uniform Activity VBR Video

Stochastic modeling of network traffic is an area of significant research activity for current and future broadband communication networks. Multimedia traffic is statistically characterized by a bursty variable bit rate (VBR) profile. In this paper, we develop an improved model for uniform activity level video sources in ATM using a doubly stochastic autoregressive model driven by an underlying spatial point process. We then examine a number of burstiness metrics such as the peak-to-average ratio (PAR), the temporal autocovariance function (ACF) and the traffic measurements histogram. We found that the former measure is most suitable for capturing the burstiness of single scene video traffic. In the last phase of this work, we analyse statistical multiplexing of several constant scene video sources. This proved, expectedly, to be advantageous with respect to reducing the burstiness of the traffic, as long as the sources are statistically independent. We observed that the burstiness was rapidly diminishing, with the largest gain occuring when only around 5 sources are multiplexed. The novel model used in this paper for characterizing uniform activity video was thus found to be an accurate model.

Modeling and Analysis of Adaptive Buffer Sharing Scheme for Consecutive Packet Loss Reduction in Broadband Networks

High speed networks provide realtime variable bit rate service with diversified traffic flow characteristics and quality requirements. The variable bit rate traffic has stringent delay and packet loss requirements. The burstiness of the correlated traffic makes dynamic buffer management highly desirable to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This paper presents an algorithm for optimization of adaptive buffer allocation scheme for traffic based on loss of consecutive packets in data-stream and buffer occupancy level. Buffer is designed to allow the input traffic to be partitioned into different priority classes and based on the input traffic behavior it controls the threshold dynamically. This algorithm allows input packets to enter into buffer if its occupancy level is less than the threshold value for priority of that packet. The threshold is dynamically varied in runtime based on packet loss behavior. The simulation is run for two priority classes of the input traffic – realtime and non-realtime classes. The simulation results show that Adaptive Partial Buffer Sharing (ADPBS) has better performance than Static Partial Buffer Sharing (SPBS) and First In First Out (FIFO) queue under the same traffic conditions.