Dynamic bandwidth allocation and buffer dimensioning under equal segment scheme to support video-on-demand services

This paper focuses on the optimization of network bandwidth allocation and buffer dimensioning to transport pre-stored MPEG video data from source to playback destination across ATM networks. This is one of the most important issues in the support of video-on-demand (VoD) service. This paper provides a novel scheme in the dynamic allocation of bandwidth to segments of video using ABR mode. The dynamic bandwidth allocation is based on a new concept, called playback tunnel which is obtained from the traffic characteristics of the pre-stored MPEG video trace to determine the optimum of transmission bandwidth as well as the buffer capacity to ensure that the playback buffer neither underflows nor overflows. The proposed scheme is tested with real-life MPEG video traces. The obtained results have shown its significant performance improvement in terms of the capacity of playback buffer, the start-up playback delay, the size of video segment and the network multiplexing gain. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.