Wavelet-based smoothing and multiplexing of VBR video traffic

Although VBR coding is more efficient than CBR coding, the burstiness of VBR video traffic brings great difficulty to network resource management. To address this problem, we propose a novel wavelet-based traffic smoothing (WTS) algorithm. Unlike existing algorithms, which only have one resolution, the WTS algorithm has a multiresolution property that is preferable for smoothing VBR video traffic that exhibits a self-similar behavior. WTS allows traffic smoothing at multiple resolutions and the best transmission schedule is searched as a pruned subtree of a full binary tree, which corresponds to the original VBR video traffic. WTS optimizes several metrics simultaneously for both the single and multiple flow cases while traditional algorithms only optimize one or two metrics for a single flow. The computational complexity of the WTS algorithm is also lower.