Aggressive Traffic Smoothing for Delivery of Online Multimedia

Traffic smoothing is an efficient means to reduce the bandwidth requirement for transmitting a VBR video. For live video applications, Sen et al. present an online algorithm referred to as SLWIN(k) to compute the transmission schedule on the fly. SLWIN(k) looks ahead W frames to compute the transmission schedule for the next k frametimes, where k≤ W. Note that W is upper bounded by the initial delay of the playback. The time complexity of SLWIN(k) is O(W*N /k) for an N frame live video. In this paper, we present an O(N) online traffic smoothing algorithm denoted as ATS (Aggressive Traffic Smoothing). ATS aggressively works ahead to transmit more data as early as possible for reducing the peak rate of the bandwidth requirement. We compare the performance of ATS with SLWIN(k) based on several benchmark video clips. Experiment results show that ATS further reduces the bandwidth requirement, especially for interactive applications in which the initial delays are small.