Fuzzy-based rate control for real-time MPEG video

We propose a fuzzy logic-based control scheme for real-time motion picture expert group (MPEG) video to avoid long delay or excessive loss at the user-network interface (UNI) in an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network. The system consists of a shaper whose role is to smooth the MPEG output traffic to reduce the burstiness of the video stream. The input and output rates of the shaper buffer are controlled by two fuzzy logic-based controllers. To avoid a long delay at the shaper, the first controller aims to tune the output rate of the shaper in the video frame time scale based on the number of available transmission credits at the UNI and the occupancy of the shaper's buffer. Based on the average occupancy of the shaper's buffer and its variance, the second controller tunes the input rate to the shaper over a much larger time scale by applying a closed-loop MPEG encoding scheme. With this approach, the traffic enters the network at an almost constant bit rate (with a very small variation) allowing simple network management functions such as admission control and bandwidth allocation, while guaranteeing a relatively constant video quality since the encoding rate is changed only in critical periods when the shaper buffer "threatens" to overflow. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through numerical tests on real video sequences.