Jitter smoothing and traffic modeling for MPEG-2 video transport over ATM networks

In this article, we study how to deal with jitter when a variable-bit-rate (VBR) MPEG-2 video is delivered through asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. First, the MPEG-2 system and its timing model are reviewed and difficulties introduced by ATM cell delay jitter are elucidated. Second, approaches to smoothing network jitter for both constant-bit-rate and VBR traffic are reviewed. A novel approach to modeling the end-to-end MPEG-2 packet generation and arrival process in the presence of network jitter is next presented. Based on this model, the buffer behavior of the MPEG-2 transport stream system target decoder is simulated. Simulation results show that jitter significantly affects the required decoder buffer size and packet loss ratio.