A Guaranteed-Rate Channel Allocation Scheme and Its Application to Delivery-on-Demand of Continuous Media Data

Abstract

We propose a new reservation-based bandwidth allocation method to satisfy the requirements of real-time data. It reserves bandwidth in the form of uniformly distributed time slots on a link. It is conceptually simple and should be easy to implement. Delayinsensitive or loss-insensitive data can be transmitted concurrently, using the unreserved bandwidth. As an example of its application, we discuss the on-demand delivery of pre-recorded, continuous media data. Given the file size, the playback rate, and the buffer space available at the client site, we compute the range for data transmission rate that prevents client buffer underflow and overflow. Based on this range, our channel allocation scheme can reserve bandwidth along the connection from the server to the client. We first discuss in detail the case where data are not compressed, so that all playback-frames of data consist of the same number of bytes, and then report similar results on the compressed data case, in which different playback-frames may consist of different numbers of bytes.