Effects of Smoothing on End-to-End
		Performance Guarantees for VBR Video


		        Edward W. Knightly 
                         EECS Department
                University of California, Berkeley

                               and

			Paola Rossaro
	     International Computer Science Institute



Integrated services networks have the framework needed to provide
performance guarantees to multimedia traffic sources such as Variable
Bit Rate (VBR) video. This paper investigates the effects of smoothing
VBR traffic sources on their end-to-end delay bounds and on the achievable
utilization inside the network.  We provide a set of rules that
determine if smoothing results in a net advantage to the source and
use experiments with traces of MPEG-compressed video to quantify the
effectiveness of smoothing in practical networking situations.