Critical bandwidth allocation for the delivery of compressed video

The transportation of compressed video data without loss of picture quality requires the network to support large fluctuations in bandwidth requirements. These fluctuations can be smoothed, but straightforward approaches to smoothing can still suffer from excessive buffering requirements, poor buffer utilization, and an excessive number of bandwidth changes. This paper introduces critical bandwidth allocation, which reduces the number of bandwidth changes to a very small number, and achieves the maximum effectiveness from client-side buffers. A comparison between critical bandwidth allocation algorithms and other smoothing algorithms is presented, the sensitivity of the algorithm to jitter is examined, and implications for the design of network services are discussed.