Perspectives on network calculus: no free lunch, but still good value

ACM Sigcomm 2006 published a paper [26] which was perceived to unify the deterministic and stochastic branches of the network calculus (abbreviated throughout as DNC and SNC) [39]. Unfortunately, this seemingly fundamental unification—which has raised the hope of a straightforward transfer of all results from DNC to SNC—is invalid. To substantiate this claim, we demonstrate that for the class of stationary and ergodic processes, which is prevalent in traffic modelling, the probabilistic arrival model from [26] is quasideterministic, i.e., the underlying probabilities are either zero or one. Thus, the probabilistic framework from [26] is unable to account for statistical multiplexing gain, which is in fact the raison d’ˆetre of packet-switched networks. Other previous formulations of SNC can capture statistical multiplexing gain, yet require additional assumptions [12, 22] or are more involved [14, 9, 28], and do not allow for a straightforward transfer of results from DNC. So,...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: SIGCOMM
• Authors: Florin Ciucu, Jens Schmitt
• Keywords: Acm Sigcomm, Communications, SIGCOMM 2006, SIGCOMM 2012, There Is No Free Lunch