Online QoS management for multimedia real-time transmission in industrial networks

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A growing number of industrial applications incorporate multimedia information processing. These multimedia applications are commonly distributed and subject to time constraints that must be met across networks without creating intolerable interference over typical control flows. However, multimedia traffic, in general, and video streaming, in particular, have specific characteristics that conflict with the operational framework of conventional real-time protocols. In particular, video compressors generate highly variable bit-rate streams that mismatch the constant-bit-rate channels typically provided by real-time protocols, severely reducing the efficiency of network utilization. This paper focuses on low-latency multimedia transmission over Ethernet with dynamic quality-of-service (QoS) management. We propose a multidimensional mechanism that controls, in an integrated way, both the compression parameters and the network bandwidth allocated to each stream. The goal is to provide the best possible QoS to each stream, recomputing the compression levels and network bandwidth whenever significant events, such as channel setup/teardown, or structural changes happen. This paper also presents novel QoS metrics based both on the image quality and network parameters. Several experiments with prerecorded video streams illustrate the advantages of the proposed approach and the convenience of the metrics. © 2010 IEEE.