Shaping of video traffic to optimise QoS and network performance

A method of shaping the video traffic within the video encoder is proposed. At the intraframe coded frames, where the maximum number of bits are generated, the coder constrains its generated bit rate through a leaky bucket mechanism. A sliding window is also used to maximise network utilisation without violating any of the traffic parameters declared at the call set-up. The impact of the shaping mechanism on both coding and network performance are studied. It is shown that for video sequences with scene cuts, shaping the video traffic under a certain peak-to-mean ratio optimises both network performance and perceived image quality.