Thinning, striping and shuffling: traffic shaping and transport techniques for variable bit rate video

We investigate transport layer processing intended to improve the communication of multimedia data over wireless and wireline networks. Specifically, we consider data striping and thinning techniques, which are applicable to the multipath/multiflow transmission of multimedia (e.g., MPEG-4). We also introduce the shuffling procedure, which reorders the data at the network edges. We show that all three techniques break up short-term correlations in data traffic thus improving its queueing performance. We demonstrate that while both long range dependence (LRD) and short range dependence (SRD) influence the queueing performance for some timescale of the queueing system, it is the short-range statistical properties of multimedia traffic within the critical time scale that are dominant in determining the buffer efficiency of the queue. We also show that estimation of LRD for thinned and striped data may lead to a misleading notion of LRD reduction, when none is warranted. We further outline the ideas for a new transport layer protocol that explores the combination of thinning, striping and shuffling approaches to multimedia data transmission.