Experimental and simulation results in the transport of MPEG-2 video over ATM

This paper investigates the sensitivity of MPEG-2 transport stream packets to communication network impairments such as bit errors and data loss. In the case of ATM, techniques for using the CRC and length fields in the AAL5 Trailer for error defection are assessed, and their effect on received video quality is observed. A new cell loss padding technique that utilizes the length field in the case of AAL5 to conceal the impact of cell losses is proposed. The essence of the proposed technique is based on passing the incomplete PDU (PDU with lost cells) and the length field to the decoder Transport Stream layer or to an AAL-SSCS where parsing and padding is performed based on the available information such as the type of incomplete TS packet. For AAL1 the sequence number is used for detection of lost cells, and padding is performed according to the position of the lost cells. Preliminary experimental results on the effect of background load, and the number of background traffic sources on the variance of cell transfer delay, and CDV of a CBR reference traffic source is also presented.