This paper classifies the variable-bit-rate traffic characteristics into two parts—the intra-scene VBR and the inter-scene VBR, and quantitatively analyzes the effects of these two kinds of VBR issues on the network traffic characteristics. Based on the analysis results, we propose a scene-based bandwidth allocation scheme to handle the bandwidth burstness problem. Performance evaluation based on real-life MPEG-IV video traces shows that the proposed scheme can achieve good tradeoff among the different objectives such as the performance measurements of network traffic burstness, initial delay, and client buffer requirement.