Overcoming the challenges to successful deployment of digital video
Mohammad Makarechian, Nicholas Malcolm · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
The received quality of MPEG-2 video depends crucially on the performance of the underlying transport technology. Loss or delays in the delivery of MPEG-2 packets can result in defects such as jagged movements or screen freezes when the video is played back. Partly because of its high bandwidth and its ability to provide QoS guarantees, ATM is widely seen as an ideal transport technology for MPEG-2 video. ATM in itself, however, is not a complete solution to the successful deployment of MPEG-2 video. The ATM connections must be configured correctly, and the MPEG-2 source must be well behaved, otherwise poor performance can still result. Traffic policing is a key mechanism used by ATM to achieve its QoS guarantees. Policing will discard traffic from sources that do not stay within the bounds of the bandwidth agreed upon when the ATM connection was set up. If the MPEG- 2 source itself is badly behaved and MPEG-2 packets are lost due to policing, then the received video quality may be poor. This paper uses commercially available equipment to assess the impact on video quality of loss due to policing in an ATM network.