This paper investigates the lossless video aggregation and transport, a concept of transmitting a group of video sessions as a bundle over a communication network. We focus on the design of optimal transmission plan with minimum receiver buffer requirement for stored variable bit-rate (VBR) videos over a constant bit-rate (CBR) channel without incurring buffer underflow and overflow. For a single video, an efficient algorithm is proposed to calculate the optimal transmission plan in only O(N) time, a significant improvement of the previous result with time complexity of O(N2log N). For multiple video sessions, we propose an aggregation scheme to calculate the changes of optimal transmission plans at the joints or separations, where a session bundled in the aggregated video stream begins or stops. The experimental results show that our algorithms stand out in terms of simplicity and efficiency.

This paper presents the system issues involved with the transmission of pre-encoded VBR MPEG video using CBR service. Conventional wisdom suggests that lossless delivery of VBR video using CBR service requires bandwidth to be reserved at the peak rate resulting in low bandwidth utilization. We calculate the minimum rate at which bandwidth must be reserved on a network in order to provide continuous playback of an MPEG encoded video bitstream. Simulation results using the frame size traces from several pre-encoded MPEG bitstreams and several buffer sizes demonstrate that this minimum reservation rateis much lower than the peak rate when a relatively small playback buffer size is used, resulting in much higher bandwidth utilization. Procedures for performing connection setup and lossless realtime video playback between the video server and the client are outlined. Methods for incorporating VCR-like features such as pauseandfast forward/reversefor Video-on-Demand (VoD) applications are presented.