Real-time traffic transmissions over the internet

Multimedia applications require the transmission of real-time streams over a network. These streams often exhibit variable bandwidth requirements, and require high bandwidths and guarantees from the network. This creates problems whensuch streams are delivered over the Internet. To solve theseproblems, recently, a small set of differentiated services hasbeen introduced. Among these, Premium Service is suitable fortransmitting real-time stored stream (full knowledge of the streamcharacteristics). It uses a bandwidth allocation mechanism (BAM)based on the stream peak rate. Due to the variable bandwidthrequirement, the peak rate BAM can waste large amount ofbandwidth. In this paper we propose a new BAM that uses lessbandwidth than the peak rate BAM, while providing the sameservice. Our BAM does not affect the real-time stream qualityof service (QoS) and does not require any modification to thePremium Service Architecture. We also introduce several framedropping mechanisms that further reduce bandwidth consumptionsubject to a QoS constraint when coupled with the aboveBAM. The proposed BAM and the dropping mechanisms areevaluated using Motion JPEG and MPEG videos and are shownto be effective in reducing bandwidth requirements. Further, sinceVCR operations are very useful in video streaming, we propose amechanism that introduces these operations in our BAM. Throughsimulations we show the effectiveness of this mechanism.