This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to measure, archive and distribute MPEG II video traffic from the 1996 Summer Olympics. The objective is to create a library of traffic signatures that can be used by the research community. Potential uses of this library are in 1) resource management studies (e.g., scheduling and call-admission control), 2) compression algorithms, and 3) video storage and retrieval performance. The MPEG-II library will be supplemented with approximately two hours of Graphics and Visualization traffic (slightly over one GByte) collected over the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center's network on their January 18, 1996 demonstration day. Together they should add to the networking community's traffic database on emerging multi-media applications. Recent traffic studies indicate that slowly-decaying auto-correlation functions and heavy-tailed marginal densities in input traffic have a significant impact on queue length statistics at a multiplexor. Further, variable bit-rate video applications have shown to exhibit slowly decaying auto-correlation functions with Gamma/Pareto marginals. Protocols and systems need to exist in the environment and need to be built for this environment. Generating representative workloads is, therefore, an important step towards effective resource management.
