Dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme in multi-user VBR communication system

Much work has been done to study the rate control problem in variable bit rate (VBR) video coding system. Most of them consider the point to point cases, where the rate control problem can often be abstracted as how to allocate bits among frames or among blocks when available bandwidth is limited. While in some other cases, such as some wireless ATM systems, multi users share the common limited bandwidth. In such conditions, the bandwidth allocation among different users becomes a rather important problem. In this paper, a novel bandwidth allocation scheme is presented, where the available bandwidth is dynamically allocated among different users based on a so called” equal distortion” criteri on. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme considerably improves the overall subjective performance in mult user VBR communication systems. It is noticed that the proposed join source and channel rate control idea is a very general concept that can be useful in many similar problems.