A practical rate control algorithm for VBR MPEG-2 video transmission over ATM networks

A joint encoder and channel rate control system for real-time VBR video transmission over ATM networks is proposed. The proposed system consists of channel rate control and encoder rate control. The channel rate over unit GOP is allocated from the proposed 3-state Markov chain model, in which the states are transient according to video traffic. Given the channel rate, encoder rate control is performed by solving the minimum distortion equation using Lagrange multiplier. Experimental results show that our method maintains consistent quality, as compared with the conventional real-time implementations, especially when there exist scene changes in the image sequences.