ATM networks promise to provide the means to support a wide range of applications exhibiting different traffic characteristics and performance requirements. Video communications have been recognized as one of the most demanding applications to be supported by ATM networks. This is mainly due to the need of transferring large amounts of data and the strict timing requirements characterizing digital video applications. In this paper, simulation experiments are conducted to study the performance of the different cell discarding control mechanisms, in terms of quality of service, when used in an ATM network supporting hierarchical encoded VBR MPEG-2 video distribution. Our results show the effectiveness of the control schemes in reducing the cell loss rates as compared to the system configuration without no cell discarding scheme in place. © 1998 IEEE.