Experimental evaluation of MPEG-2 video over differentiated services IP networks

As multimedia find their way in many applications and services, and with Internet's undisputed success as the networking technology of the future for the provision of integrated services, it became necessary that these two technologies interoperate effectively with each other. The real-time quality of service requirements of many multimedia applications involving video, audio etc., can not be satisfied by the best effort scenario, which is the basis of operation for the first generation of Internet. In order to make Internet quality of service (QoS) capable, IETF proposed a series of protocols and algorithms, some of them forming what is known as "Differentiated Services". In this paper, we evaluate the performance of MPEG-2 video over a Diffserv-capable network. Our extensive testing results give a very promising picture. With proper resource management and traffic engineering, differentiated services can provide satisfactory QoS to applications with serious delay and delay variation, packet loss and throughput requirements, such as MPEG-2 video.