On the integration of best-effort and guaranteed performance services

One of the main challenges of emerging high speed telecommunication network s is the integration of services. Both ATM as well as the Internet have bee n evolving so as to accommodate both best-effort type traffic (such as file transfer) as well as real time traffic requiring guaranteed performance. T he co-existence of these two service types on the same network carries impo rtant benefits such as resource sharing between service classes, and the ab ility of the user to easily select an appropriate service class according t o requirements and preferences. These benefits depend on efficient network management and resource sharing strategies. The aim of this paper is twofol d. First, we study the performance measures of both service types, as a fun ction of the network management strategy. This study allows us at a second phase to design efficient network management schemes. This includes questio ns such as whether best-effort traffic should use only bandwidth left-over by the guaranteed performance ones, or whether (and how much) bandwidth nee ds to be reserved to best-effort traffic. Another management issue that we study is the pricing. We allow for different classes of guaranteed-performa nce traffic to have different priorities with respect to the rejection prob abilities.