Effective bandwidths and performance bounds in high-speed communication systems

This paper is concerned with quality of service guarantees in an environmen t with bursty traffic streams, such as those in the emerging ATM-based broa dband ISDN.(4) For virtually any traffic stream, new performance bounds are obtained in terms of effective bandwidths and burstiness constraints. The new bounds are tighter than those previously available and are asymptotical ly achievable, potentially resulting in better performance when used in tra ffic management. Various performance measures are considered. It is shown t hat the effective bandwidth of a departing traffic is bounded by that of th e incoming traffic. For traffic streams having independent increments and M arkov-modulated processes, the bounds are further refined to a point close to the exact values in some cases. Computationally, evaluation of the bound s requires less effort than finding effective bandwidths and burstiness con straints. Finally, the bounds are applied to routing control to find the ne ar-optimal probabilistic routing policy.