EFFECTIVE BANDWIDTH VECTORS FOR MULTICLASS TRAFFIC MULTIPLEXED IN A PARTITIONED BUFFER

We consider a traffic model where a single source generates traffic ha ving J (J greater than or equal to 2) quality of service (QoS) classes . QoS in this case is described by a cell loss probability objective e psilon(j) for QoS class j. We assume that epsilon(1) greater than or e qual to epsilon(2) greater than or equal to ... greater than or equal to epsilon(J), in other words, class J has the most stringent QoS requ irements and class 1 the least. The traffic from K such independent he terogeneous Markov-modulated fluid sources is multiplexed into a singl e buffer of size B. There are J - 1 thresholds {B-j, 1 less than or eq ual to j less than or equal to J - 1} such that 0 < B-1 < B-2 <...< B- J-1 < B. Let B-0 = 0 and B-J = B. If the buffer content is in (B-j-1, B-j), 1 less than or equal to j less than or equal to J only traffic o f class index j or above is accepted and all other traffic is rejected . For this system of K sources we define an effective bandwidth vector of size J such that QoS requirements for all classes are satisfied if each component of the vector is less than the channel capacity, We pr opose several bandwidth vectors that can be computed for each source s eparately. Numerical studies are reported on the efficacy of these ban dwidth vectors.