Dealing with traffic control of multimedia services in packet-switched networks, we present
new quality indices that are applicable to any streaming application. Considering the given capacity of a bottleneck link, the latter comprise the time delay between successfully delivered packets, the byte loss due to a lack of capacity and the lossless time that is the duration of successful transmission of packets. Since several active streams may share the capacity of the channel, we propose an algorithm of equivalent bandwidth management in the case of a bufferless channel. We estimate a smallest equivalent capacity which provides the best possible trade-off between quality indices. We use inter-arrival times between packets and packet lengths of the real-time packet traffic. We illustrate our new methodology for peer-to-peer video data arising from an aggregated flow of packets exchanged with a selected peer in the overlay network of a SopCast session and estimate the proposed indices and required bandwidth.
