—The notion of effective bandwidths has provided a useful practical framework for connection admission control and capacity planning in high-speed communication networks. The associated admissible set with a single linear boundary makes it possible to apply stochastic-loss-network (generalized-Erlang) models for capacity planning. In this paper we consider the case of network nodes that use a priority-service discipline to support multiple classes of service, and we wish to determine an appropriate notion of effective bandwidths. Just as was done previously for the first-in first-out (FIFO) discipline, we use largebuffer asymptotics (large deviations principles) for workload tail probabilities as a theoretical basis. We let each priority class have its own buffer and its own constraint on the probability of buffer overflow. Unfortunately, however, this leads to a constraint for each priority class. Moreover, the large-buffer asymptotic theory with priority classes does not produce...
Arthur W. Berger, Ward Whitt