End-to-end quality of service guarantees to video and multimedia traffic over next generation optical networks

Future generation communication networks will have to carry large amounts of video and multimedia traffic. While high-speed fiber-optic networks can provide the bandwidth needed for multimedia applications, most data networks in use today do not provide the Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees required for supporting real-time video and multimedia communication.; The Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) protocol was designed for providing QoS guarantees to video and multimedia applications in high-speed networks. Due to high cost and complexity, ATM failed to attain widespread success. On the other hand, the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol for the Internet, is evolving in a number of ways to provide QoS to multimedia applications. It is expected that the future generation Internet running on the high-speed fiber-optic networks will be able to support real-time video and multimedia traffic along with traditional data traffic.; Considering the recently proposed modifications to the IP protocol for providing QoS, an end-to-end model has been developed for Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) video transmission over future generation optical networks. The model takes into account traffic shapers at the source, and traffic schedulers at intermediate nodes of the future generation high-speed networks. Analytical models for the traffic shaper and the traffic scheduler have been developed, and their validity has been verified by simulations.; The traffic shaper model can be used for determining the traffic parameters that have to be specified while setting up an MPEG video stream. Also, a traffic shaper can be used for controlling the QoS properties of an MPEG flow.; The scheduler model is essential for connection admission control, which requires determining how many flows can be supported without violating QoS guarantees. For the scheduler, a comparison between deterministic and statistical frameworks for QoS guarantees is carried out, and it is observed that statistical frameworks can increase network utilization considerably compared to the deterministic framework.