Video Activity-Based Traffic Policing: A New Paradigm

The constant development of new multimedia applications, which are “greedy” in terms of bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, calls for new approaches to the traffic policing problem. This paper proposes, analyzes and presents an extensive performance evaluation of such a new approach, namely the activity-based video traffic policing. Using as a motivation recent work, which has shown that the classic traffic policing mechanisms provide unnecessarily strict policing for conforming but bursty video users, we propose five simple and efficient new mechanisms, which take into consideration and exploit video activity and the Group-of Pictures (GoP) pattern of the video traces. Contrary to the classic approach, our mechanisms do not use a token generator based on a fixed rate, but vary the token generation rate according to specific video activity-based algorithms. The results show significant improvement for conforming users, and reveal that dynamic traffic policing can provide much higher efficiency than the widely used static mechanisms. One of the new mechanisms, the Frame Size Aware Token Bucket, is shown to clearly outperform all other policing approaches for conforming users, and to provide comparable policing results with the classic mechanisms for non-conforming video users.