Digital video and multimedia applications require firm guarantees on delay and bandwidth. As IntServ and DiffServ IP traffic start flowing over the ATM backbone networks, the ATM networks should be able to provide the quality of service requirements for the IP traffic. This requires an accurate and efficient mapping of IP traffic parameters on to ATM traffic parameters. Currently we are modeling MPEG-compressed video transmission, including queuing delays, bandwidth utilization, buffer requirement etc. Multimedia will be the predominant traffic in the next generation high speed networks.
Multimedia consists of voice, video and data in the same application.
In order to reduce the bandwidth requirement, video is therefore compressed before transmission over the network. MPEG standard is one of the most widely applied video compression standard. The compressed video is therefore bursty in nature which gives rise to a number of traffic management issues such as flow control, congestion control, traffic shaping, dynamical bandwidth allocation, and buffering strategies. Statistical multiplexing of bursty video sources in an ATM network improves the bandwidth utilization of the network and lowers the service cost. Furthermore, the multiplexing of multimedia streams reduces the burstiness and bandwidth requirement of the aggregate traffic.