Performance Bounds in Communication Networks with Variable-Rate Links

In most network models for quality of service support, the communication links interconnecting the switches and gateways are assumed to have fixed bandwidth and zero error rate. This assumption of steadiness, especially in a heterogeneous internetworking environment, might be invalid owing to subnetwork multiple-access mechanism, link-level flow/error control, and user mobility. Techniques are presented in this paper to characterize and analyze work-conserving communication nodes with varying output rate. In the deterministic approach, the notion of “fluctuation constraint,” analogous to the “burstiness constraint” for traffic characterization, is introduced to characterize the node. In the statistical approach, the variable-rate output is modelled as an “exponentially bounded fluctuation” process in a way similar to the “exponentially bounded burstiness” method for traffic modelling. Based on these concepts, deterministic and statistical bounds on queue size and packe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Kam Lee
• Keywords: Communications, Heterogeneous Internetworking Environment, Queue Size, Queue Size Bounds, SIGCOMM 1995