Joint selection of source and channel rate for VBR video transmission under ATM policing constraints

Variable bit-rate (VBR) transmission of video over ATM networks has long been said to provide substantial benefits, both in terms of network utilization and video quality, when compared with conventional constant bit-rate (CBR) approaches. However, realistic VBR transmission environments will certainly impose constraints on the rate that each source can submit to the network. We formalize the problem of optimizing the quality of the transmitted video by jointly selecting the source rate (number of bits used for a given frame) and the channel rate (number of bits transmitted during a given frame interval). This selection is subject to two sets of constraints, namely, (1) the end-to-end delay has to be constant to allow for real-time video display and (2) the transmission rate has to be consistent with the traffic parameters negotiated by user and network. For a general class of constraints, including such popular ones as the leaky bucket, we introduce an algorithm to find the optimal solution to this problem. This algorithm allows us to compare VBR and CBR under the same end-to-end delay constraints. Our results indicate that variable-rate transmission can increase the quality of the decoded sequences without increases in the end-to-end delay. Finally, we show that for the leaky-bucket channel, the channel constraints can be combined with the buffer constraints, such that the system is identical to CBR transmission with an additional, infrequently imposed constraint. Therefore, video quality with a leaky-bucket channel can achieve the same quality of a CBR channel with larger physical buffers, without adding to the physical delay in the system.