ENTROPY OF ATM TRAFFIC STREAMS - A TOOL FOR ESTIMATING QOS PARAMETERS

For the purposes of estimating quality-of-service parameters, it is en ough to know the large deviation rate-function of an ATM traffic strea m; modeling procedures can be bypassed if we can estimate the rate-fun ction directly, exploiting the analogy between the rate-function and t hermodynamic entropy. We show that this proposal is soundly based on s tatistical sampling theory. Experiments on the Fairisle ATM network at the University of Cambridge have established that it is feasible to c ollect the required data in real time.