On the effects of smoothing for deterministic QoS

In order for a network to provide end-to-end guarantees on quality of service (QoS), it must allocate its resources according to the traffic characteristics and performance requirements of its clients. However, the burstiness of typical variable bit rate traffic streams makes it difficult to provide the QoS guarantees that the network’s clients require and simultaneously make efficient use of network resources. In this paper, we investigate the impact that smoothing traffic at the network’s edge has on both the client’s QoS and on the network’s utilization. Considering the case of end-to-end deterministic QoS guarantees, we explore the analytical foundations of smoothing and identify the scenarios in which smoothing is beneficial to the network or its clients. Moreover, we quantify the potential benefits of smoothing with a set of experiments based on traces of MPEG-compressed video in heterogeneous multi-hop networking environments.