Abstract
This paper proposes a multimedia streaming architecture that combines network and video technologies to handle video traffic over multi-hop access networks. In this context, resource overprovision typical of current quality of service approaches will become a limiting factor because of the increasing spread of bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications. The proposed scheme adopts a time-driven priority scheduling at network nodes and exploits slice classification at the video encoder to differentiate packets. The service guarantees offered by time-driven priority, together with the packet classification, significantly reduce congestion and increase the video quality at the receiver with respect to the traditional differentiated services (DiffServ) approach, also achieving high resource utilization. This is an important result, as current DiffServ-based architectures are far from obtaining such resource utilization in conjunction with reasonable delays and jitters.