An optimal method for allocating buffer and bandwidth for MPEG traffic in a network node

Multimedia transmission is becoming a very important service on the Internet. For continuous playback at the client, strict quality of service (QoS) must be provided in an end-to-end manner. To guarantee this QoS supposes a very demanding resource reservation on the network. Therefore, it is necessary to optimise the reservation of network resources. We introduce a new method to optimise the reservation of buffer and bandwidth in the network nodes using a condensed description of the traffic: the envelope points. Previous work has obtained an “optimal” buffer/bandwidth trade-off using an on-off model of the traffic. Using the envelope points, we introduce a new method to obtain a new optimal trade-off that implies less buffer reservation for a given bandwidth reservation. Evaluation of this new method has been done using MPEG traffic and the tests shows that the savings can be up to 95% over the on-off model