Application of the many sources asymptotic and effective bandwidths to traffic engineering

Accurate yet simple methods for traffic engineering are important for effic ient management of resources in broadband networks. The goal of this paper is to apply and evaluate large deviation techniques for traffic engineering . In particular, we employ the recently developed theory of effective bandw idths, where the effective bandwidth depends not only on the statistical ch aracteristics of the traffic stream, but also on a link's operating point t hrough two parameters, the space and time parameters, which can be computed using the many sources asymptotic. We show that this effective bandwidth d efinition can accurately quantify resource usage. Furthermore, we estimate and interpret values of the space and time parameters for various mixes of real traffic demonstrating how these values can be used to clarify the effe cts on the link performance of the time scales of traffic burstiness, of th e link resources (capacity and buffer), and of traffic control mechanisms s uch as traffic shaping. Our experiments involve a large set of MPEG-1 compr essed video and Internet Wide Area Network (WAN) traces, as well as modeled voice traffic.