A control of channel rate for real-time variable bit rate video transmission

Recent studies on the Constant Bit Rate and Variable Bit Rate transmissions have mainly focused on the frame by frame encoder rate control based on the quantization parameter. With the existing approaches it is difficult to guarantee a consistent video quality. Also, the rate control overhead is too high for the real-time video sources. In this paper, a channel rate allocation scheme based on the control period is proposed to transmit a real-time video, in which the control period is defined by a pre-specified number of frames or group of pictures. At each control period, video traffic information is collected to determine the channel rate at the next control period. The channel rate is allocated to satisfy various channel rate constraints such that the buffer occupancy at the decoder is maintained at a target level. If the allocated channel rate approaches the level at which the negotiated traffic descriptions may be violated, the encoder rate is decreased through adjusting quantization parameters in the MPEG encoder. In the experimental results, the video quality and the overflow and underflow probabilities at the buffer are compared at different control periods. Experiments show that the video quality and the utilization of network bandwidth resources can be optimized through the suitable selection of the control period.