  The network transport of 3D video, which contains two views of a video scene,
poses significant challenges due to the increased video data compared to
conventional single-view video. Addressing these challenges requires a thorough
understanding of the traffic and multiplexing characteristics of the different
representation formats of 3D video. We examine the average bitrate-distortion
(RD) and bitrate variability-distortion (VD) characteristics of three main
representation formats. Specifically, we compare multiview video (MV)
representation and encoding, frame sequential (FS) representation, and
side-by-side (SBS) representation, whereby conventional single-view encoding is
employed for the FS and SBS representations. Our results for long 3D videos in
full HD format indicate that the MV representation and encoding achieves the
highest RD efficiency, while exhibiting the highest bitrate variabilities. We
examine the impact of these bitrate variabilities on network transport through
extensive statistical multiplexing simulations. We find that when multiplexing
a small number of streams, the MV and FS representations require the same
bandwidth. However, when multiplexing a large number of streams or smoothing
traffic, the MV representation and encoding reduces the bandwidth requirement
relative to the FS representation.
