Multiplexing of MPEG video sources over an ATM LAN

We study the characterization of MPEG sources and their multiplexing onto a 25 Mbps port of an ATM LAN. The bit rate characteristics of a wide variety of MPEG sequences have been measured. Although long range dependence has been observed in sample autocorrelations, we have focused on the exponentially decaying short range dependence and constructed a 4-state Markov-modulated fluid source model based on ensemble measurements of various sequences. This MPEG source model is then used to study the statistical behavior of a common buffer that multiplexes multiple sources onto a 25 Mbps ATM LAN switch. We derive the cell loss performance versus buffer size when the number of multiplexed sources is increased. With an ensemble source average rate of 1.67 Mbps, our results show that a cell loss rate better than 10/sup -6/ is maintained by a 800-cell buffer if 10 sources are used, yielding a multiplexing gain of 2.