Estimation of multiplexer-introduced loss for MPEG-4 data streams connected to (R)CBR channels

As MPEG-4 uses objects to compose scenes, and each object is transmitted using one or more data streams (e.g. for audio, video base, and video enhancement layers) the network overhead for a single service can be very high. MPEG-4 systems specifies a multiplexing tool to reduce the network overhead. This multiplexer can drop frames, if the frames deadlines and the network channel QoS make a timely transmission impossible. The need to estimate the loss introduced by the multiplexer arises, even more so since MPEG-4 objects appear and disappear at random times, which increases the dynamic of the output traffic specification and QoS renegotiations. We present an approach to estimate the loss introduced by the multiplexer. The approach is based on statistical models for video and audio streams as well as for the dropping multiplexer.