A comparison of VBR video smoothing and transmission schemes under a unified abstraction model

In recent years, buffering and traffic smoothing techniques for VER video transmissions have received much attention and many effective algorithms have been proposed. It becomes essential that a unified abstraction model be introduced in order to better understand these algorithms and their relationships. In this paper, we present a simple abstraction model and show how these algorithms can be represented and how their corresponding problems relate to each other under this model. For example, we intuitively illustrate how one algorithm can be transformed to another with the addition(or release) of certain constraints. In particular, we focus on examining the similarities and the differences of two algorithms under our abstraction model: the minimum polyline smoothing and the majorization smoothing. The common smoothness parameters of these two algorithms are then thoroughly compared through experimental results based on some MPEG-I video traces. The discrepancies in these results are explained and their implications on both transmission scheduling and network resource negotiation are discussed.