A simulation study of real-time MPEG traffic using forward error control scheme

MPEG coding dramatically reduces the amount of data required for video. On the other hand, its bursty and cyclic nature creates a challenge for transmission in ATM networks. Various methods have been proposed to transmit MPEG streams, such as priority coding, dynamic bandwidth allocation and smoothing. This paper suggests another scheme to solve the problem. The original MPEG streams are split into n substreams and the substreams are skewed by a fixed amount of time from each other. The substreams are transmitted with the forward error correction code. This provides a deterministic bound on the delay and has the implementation simplicity needed for high-speed video applications. We have tested the scheme on five real MPEG-coded video/movie stream traces and found that it significantly reduces the peak cell losses at the price of longer delay.