Dynamic bandwidth allocation and buffer dimensioning for supporting video-on-demand services in virtual private networks

This paper focuses on the optimization of network bandwidth allocation and buffer dimensioning for transporting pre-stored MPEG video data from the source to the playback destination across virtual private network (VPN). This is one of the most important issues in the support of video-on-demand (VoD) service over VPN. This paper provides a novel scheme in the dynamic allocation of bandwidth to segments of video using the ABR mode The dynamic bandwidth allocation mechanism is based on a new concept, called playback tunnel obtained from the traffic characteristics of the pre-stored MPEG video trace, to determine the optimum of transmission bandwidth as well as the optimum of buffer capacity to ensure that the playback buffer neither underflows nor overflows. The proposed scheme is tested with real-life MPEG video traces. The obtained results have shown its significant performance improvement in terms of the capacity of playback buffer, the start-up playback delay, network utilization and the network multiplexing gain. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.