Evaluation of adaptive filtering of MPEG system streams in IP networks

Congestion and large differences in available link bandwidth create challenges for the design of applications that want to deliver high quality video over the Internet. We investigate the placement of computation agents within the network to provide filtering to adapt MPEG system streams to the available bandwidth without transcoding. The paper presents an evaluation of our implementation in three different operating environments: a networking testbed in a laboratory environment, a home-user scenario (DSL line with 640 Kbit/sec), and a wide area network covering the Atlantic (server in Europe, client in the US). Our architecture leverages previous work and introduces efficient MPEG system filtering to achieve high quality video over best-effort networks.