A multi-level satellite channel allocation algorithm for VBR real-time data

Integrated services over a shared satellite channel need a MAC protocol that is able to deal with real-time traffic without substantially affecting the efficiency of the shared medium. Because of its bursty nature, MPEG coded VBR video transmission is one of the most challenging real-time applications. In this paper we analyse the statistical performance of a simple allocation method for VBR traffic by using an accurate statistical model of an MPEG-2 VBR coded movie, which exhibits a peak to mean ratio of about 4. The results were obtained both analytically and by simulation, and show that our method is suitable for transmitting non-interactive video and best-effort traffic on the same satellite link.