Supporting real time video over ATM networks

Includes bibliographical references.In this project, we propose and evaluate an approach to delimit and tag such independent video slice at the ATM layer for early discard. This involves the use of a tag cell differentiated from the rest of the data by its PTI value and a modified tag switch to facilitate the selective discarding of affected cells within each video slice as opposed to dropping of cells at random from multiple video frames

Buffer management and cell switching management in wireless packet communications

The buffer management and the cell switching (e.g., packet handoff) management using buffer management scheme are studied in Wireless Packet Communications. First, a throughput improvement method for multi-class services is proposed in Wireless Packet System. Efficient traffic management schemes should be developed to provide seamless access to the wireless network. Specially, it is proposed to regulate the buffer by the Selective- Delay Push-In (SDPI) scheme, which is applicable to scheduling delay-tolerant non-real time traffic and delay-sensitive real time traffic. Simulation results show that the performance observed by real time traffics are improved as compared to existing buffer priority scheme in term of packet loss probability. Second, the performance of the proposed SDPI scheme is analyzed in a single CBR server. The arrival process is derived from the superposition of two types of traffics, each in turn results from the superposition of homogeneous ON-OFF sources that can be approximated by means of a two-state Markov Modulated Poisson Process (MMPP). The buffer mechanism enables the ATM layer to adapt the quality of the cell transfer to the QoS requirements and to improve the utilization of network resources. This is achieved by selective-delaying and pushing-in cells according to the class they belong to. Analytical expressions for various performance parameters and numerical results are obtained. Simulation results in term of cell loss probability conform with our numerical analysis. Finally, a novel cell-switching scheme based on TDMA protocol is proposed to support QoS guarantee for the downlink. The new packets and handoff packets for each type of traffic are defined and a new cutoff prioritization scheme is devised at the buffer of the base station. A procedure to find the optimal thresholds satisfying the QoS requirements is presented. Using the ON-OFF approximation for aggregate traffic, the packet loss probability and the average packet delay are computed. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulation and numerical analysis in terms of packet loss probability and average packet delay

Application of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (Atm) technology to Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (Pacs): A survey

Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (R-ISDN) provides a range of narrowband and broad-band services for voice, video, and multimedia. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) has been selected by the standards bodies as the transfer mode for implementing B-ISDN; The ability to digitize images has lead to the prospect of reducing the physical space requirements, material costs, and manual labor of traditional film handling tasks in hospitals. The system which handles the acquisition, storage, and transmission of medical images is called a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). The transmission system will directly impact the speed of image transfer. Today the most common transmission means used by acquisition and display station products is Ethernet. However, when considering network media, it is important to consider what the long term needs will be. Although ATM is a new standard, it is showing signs of becoming the next logical step to meet the needs of high speed networks; This thesis is a survey on ATM, and PACS. All the concepts involved in developing a PACS are presented in an orderly manner. It presents the recent developments in ATM, its applicability to PACS and the issues to be resolved for realising an ATM-based complete PACS. This work will be useful in providing the latest information, for any future research on ATM-based networks, and PACS

Some aspects of traffic control and performance evaluation of ATM networks

The emerging high-speed Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks are expected to integrate through statistical multiplexing large numbers of traffic sources having a broad range of statistical characteristics and different Quality of Service (QOS) requirements. To achieve high utilisation of network resources while maintaining the QOS, efficient traffic management strategies have to be developed. This thesis considers the problem of traffic control for ATM networks. The thesis studies the application of neural networks to various ATM traffic control issues such as feedback congestion control, traffic characterization, bandwidth estimation, and Call Admission Control (CAC). A novel adaptive congestion control approach based on a neural network that uses reinforcement learning is developed. It is shown that the neural controller is very effective in providing general QOS control. A Finite Impulse Response (FIR) neural network is proposed to adaptively predict the traffic arrival process by learning the relationship between the past and future traffic variations. On the basis of this prediction, a feedback flow control scheme at input access nodes of the network is presented. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvement over conventional control mechanisms. In addition, an accurate yet computationally efficient approach to effective bandwidth estimation for multiplexed connections is investigated. In this method, a feed forward neural network is employed to model the nonlinear relationship between the effective bandwidth and the traffic situations and a QOS measure. Applications of this approach to admission control, bandwidth allocation and dynamic routing are also discussed. A detailed investigation has indicated that CAC schemes based on effective bandwidth approximation can be very conservative and prevent optimal use of network resources. A modified effective bandwidth CAC approach is therefore proposed to overcome the drawback of conventional methods. Considering statistical multiplexing between traffic sources, we directly calculate the effective bandwidth of the aggregate traffic which is modelled by a two-state Markov modulated Poisson process via matching four important statistics. We use the theory of large deviations to provide a unified description of effective bandwidths for various traffic sources and the associated ATM multiplexer queueing performance approximations, illustrating their strengths and limitations. In addition, a more accurate estimation method for ATM QOS parameters based on the Bahadur-Rao theorem is proposed, which is a refinement of the original effective bandwidth approximation and can lead to higher link utilisation

Layer-based coding, smoothing, and scheduling of low-bit-rate video for teleconferencing over tactical ATM networks

This work investigates issues related to distribution of low bit rate video within the context of a teleconferencing application deployed over a tactical ATM network. The main objective is to develop mechanisms that support transmission of low bit rate video streams as a series of scalable layers that progressively improve quality. The hierarchical nature of the layered video stream is actively exploited along the transmission path from the sender to the recipients to facilitate transmission. A new layered coder design tailored to video teleconferencing in the tactical environment is proposed. Macroblocks selected due to scene motion are layered via subband decomposition using the fast Haar transform. A generalized layering scheme groups the subbands to form an arbitrary number of layers. As a layering scheme suitable for low motion video is unsuitable for static slides, the coder adapts the layering scheme to the video content. A suboptimal rate control mechanism that reduces the kappa dimensional rate distortion problem resulting from the use of multiple quantizers tailored to each layer to a 1 dimensional problem by creating a single rate distortion curve for the coder in terms of a suboptimal set of kappa dimensional quantizer vectors is investigated. Rate control is thus simplified into a table lookup of a codebook containing the suboptimal quantizer vectors. The rate controller is ideal for real time video and limits fluctuations in the bit stream with no corresponding visible fluctuations in perceptual quality. A traffic smoother prior to network entry is developed to increase queuing and scheduler efficiency. Three levels of smoothing are studied: frame, layer, and cell interarrival. Frame level smoothing occurs via rate control at the application. Interleaving and cell interarrival smoothing are accomplished using a leaky bucket mechanism inserted prior to the adaptation layer or within the adaptation layerhttp://www.archive.org/details/layerbasedcoding00parkLieutenant Commander, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Traffic control mechanisms with cell rate simulation for ATM networks.

PhDAbstract not availabl

Designing new network adaptation and ATM adaptation layers for interactive multimedia applications

Multimedia services, audiovisual applications composed of a combination of discrete and continuous data streams, will be a major part of the traffic flowing in the next generation of high speed networks. The cornerstones for multimedia are Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) foreseen as the technology for the future Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN) and audio and video compression algorithms such as MPEG-2 that reduce applications bandwidth requirements. Powerful desktop computers available today can integrate seamlessly the network access and the applications and thus bring the new multimedia services to home and business users. Among these services, those based on multipoint capabilities are expected to play a major role.    Interactive multimedia applications unlike traditional data transfer applications have stringent simultaneous requirements in terms of loss and delay jitter due to the nature of audiovisual information. In addition, such stream-based applications deliver data at a variable rate, in particular if a constant quality is required.    ATM, is able to integrate traffic of different nature within a single network creating interactions of different types that translate into delay jitter and loss. Traditional protocol layers do not have the appropriate mechanisms to provide the required network quality of service (QoS) for such interactive variable bit rate (VBR) multimedia multipoint applications. This lack of functionalities calls for the design of protocol layers with the appropriate functions to handle the stringent requirements of multimedia.    This thesis contributes to the solution of this problem by proposing new Network Adaptation and ATM Adaptation Layers for interactive VBR multimedia multipoint services.    The foundations to build these new multimedia protocol layers are twofold; the requirements of real-time multimedia applications and the nature of compressed audiovisual data.    On this basis, we present a set of design principles we consider as mandatory for a generic Multimedia AAL capable of handling interactive VBR multimedia applications in point-to-point as well as multicast environments. These design principles are then used as a foundation to derive a first set of functions for the MAAL, namely; cell loss detection via sequence numbering, packet delineation, dummy cell insertion and cell loss correction via RSE FEC techniques.    The proposed functions, partly based on some theoretical studies, are implemented and evaluated in a simulated environment. Performances are evaluated from the network point of view using classic metrics such as cell and packet loss. We also study the behavior of the cell loss process in order to evaluate the efficiency to be expected from the proposed cell loss correction method. We also discuss the difficulties to map network QoS parameters to user QoS parameters for multimedia applications and especially for video information. In order to present a complete performance evaluation that is also meaningful to the end-user, we make use of the MPQM metric to map the obtained network performance results to a user level. We evaluate the impact that cell loss has onto video and also the improvements achieved with the MAAL.    All performance results are compared to an equivalent implementation based on AAL5, as specified by the current ITU-T and ATM Forum standards.    An AAL has to be by definition generic. But to fully exploit the functionalities of the AAL layer, it is necessary to have a protocol layer that will efficiently interface the network and the applications. This role is devoted to the Network Adaptation Layer.    The network adaptation layer (NAL) we propose, aims at efficiently interface the applications to the underlying network to achieve a reliable but low overhead transmission of video streams. Since this requires an a priori knowledge of the information structure to be transmitted, we propose the NAL to be codec specific.    The NAL targets interactive multimedia applications. These applications share a set of common requirements independent of the encoding scheme used. This calls for the definition of a set of design principles that should be shared by any NAL even if the implementation of the functions themselves is codec specific. On the basis of the design principles, we derive the common functions that NALs have to perform which are mainly two; the segmentation and reassembly of data packets and the selective data protection.    On this basis, we develop an MPEG-2 specific NAL. It provides a perceptual syntactic information protection, the PSIP, which results in an intelligent and minimum overhead protection of video information. The PSIP takes advantage of the hierarchical organization of the compressed video data, common to the majority of the compression algorithms, to perform a selective data protection based on the perceptual relevance of the syntactic information.    The transmission over the combined NAL-MAAL layers shows significant improvement in terms of CLR and perceptual quality compared to equivalent transmissions over AAL5 with the same overhead.    The usage of the MPQM as a performance metric, which is one of the main contributions of this thesis, leads to a very interesting observation. The experimental results show that for unexpectedly high CLRs, the average perceptual quality remains close to the original value. The economical potential of such an observation is very important. Given that the data flows are VBR, it is possible to improve network utilization by means of statistical multiplexing. It is therefore possible to reduce the cost per communication by increasing the number of connections with a minimal loss in quality.    This conclusion could not have been derived without the combined usage of perceptual and network QoS metrics, which have been able to unveil the economic potential of perceptually protected streams.    The proposed concepts are finally tested in a real environment where a proof-of-concept implementation of the MAAL has shown a behavior close to the simulated results therefore validating the proposed multimedia protocol layers

A Slotted Ring Test Bed for the Study of ATM Network Congestion Management

This thesis addresses issues raised by the proposed Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network which will provide a flexible combination of integrated services traffic through its cell-based Asynchronbus Transport Mode (ATM). The introduction of a cell-based, connection-oriented, transport mode brings with it new technical challenges for network management. The routing of cells, their service at switching centres, and problems of cell congestion not encountered in the existing network, are some of the key issues. The thesis describes the development of a hardware slotted ring testbed for the investigation of congestion management in an ATM network. The testbed is designed to incorporate a modified form of the ORWELL protocol to control media access. The media access protocol is analysed to give a model for maximum throughput and reset interval under various traffic distributions. The results from the models are compared with measurements carried out on the testbed, where cell arrival statistics are also varied. It is shown that the maximum throughput of the testbed is dependent on both traffic distribution and cell arrival statistics. The testbed is used for investigations in a heterogeneous traffic environment where two classes of traffic with different cell arrival statistics and quality of service requirements are defined. The effect of prioritisation, media access protocol, traffic intensity, and traffic source statistics were investigated by determining an Admissible Load Region (ALR) for a network station. Conclusions drawn from this work suggest that there are many problems associated with the reliable definition of an ALR because of the number of variable parameters which could shift the ALR boundary. A suggested direction for further work is to explore bandwidth reservation and the concept of equivalent capacity of a connection, and how this can be linked to source control parameters

Space-Based Information Infrastructure Architecture for Broadband Services

This study addressed four tasks: (1) identify satellite-addressable information infrastructure markets; (2) perform network analysis for space-based information infrastructure; (3) develop conceptual architectures; and (4) economic assessment of architectures. The report concludes that satellites will have a major role in the national and global information infrastructure, requiring seamless integration between terrestrial and satellite networks. The proposed LEO, MEO, and GEO satellite systems have satellite characteristics that vary widely. They include delay, delay variations, poorer link quality and beam/satellite handover. The barriers against seamless interoperability between satellite and terrestrial networks are discussed. These barriers are the lack of compatible parameters, standards and protocols, which are presently being evaluated and reduced