Effective bandwidths and performance bounds in high-speed communication systems

This paper is concerned with quality of service guarantees in an environment with bursty traffic streams, such as those in the emerging ATM-based broadband ISDN. For virtually any traffic stream, new performance bounds are obtained in terms of effective bandwidths and burstiness constraints. The new bounds are tighter than those previously available and are asymptotically achievable, potentially resulting in better performance when used in traffic management. Various performance measures are considered. It is shown that the effective bandwidth of a departing traffic is bounded by that of the incoming traffic. For traffic streams having independent increments and Markov-modulated processes, the bounds are further refined to a point close to the exact values in some cases. Computationally, evaluation of the bounds requires less effort than finding effective bandwidths and burstiness constraints. Finally, the bounds are applied to routing control to find the near-optimal probabilistic routing policy.