An Efficient Statistical Multiplexing Method for H.264 Vbr Video Sources for Improved Traffic Smoothing

Frame level H.264/MPEG encoded VBR video traffic is highly bursty in nature because of inherent coding techniques employed. Multiplexing traffic from many VBR sources results in smoothing of generated traffic from the multiplexer, and improves Statistical Multiplexing Gain (SMG). An efficient multiplexing methodology can greatly enhance resource utilization. Performance of multiplexer can be estimated by addressing the burstiness and statistical multiplexing gain. We present here a new multiplexing method named "ERA multiplexing", which is quite simple, faster and efficient as opposed to any other known methods like, Frame-aligned multiplexing, Frame-lag based multiplexing and random multiplexing. Our experiments have proved that ERA method is much superior in terms of smoothing the traffic and achieving better statistical multiplexing gain. We have tested the technique with high quality frame size traces of Star Wars-IV encoded using H.264/SVC and H.264/AVC to justify our claims.