Traffic splitting in a network: split traffic models and applications

The contemporary high-speed networks, e.g. the Internet and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks provide a convenient and cost-effective communication platform to carry the emerging multimedia applications. However, problems, such as network congestion caused by overloaded traffic get worse day by day. Thus, how to properly control the system while maintaining the quality of service (QoS) for users becomes an important and challenging issue. To reach the goal of QoS guarantee, load sharing or traffic balancing is one of important techniques to improve the whole network performance. In this paper, we focus on the probabilistic routing policy and analyze split traffic models under such a probabilistic routing policy with input traffic models of the batch Markovian arrival process (BMAP) and discrete-time BMAP (D-BMAP) which can be employed to characterize the multimedia traffic in current and future networks. We successfully show that the split traffic on each routing path from an original BMAP (D-BMAP) input is still a BMAP (D-BMAP). The detailed traffic structure is also acquired. Applying traffic splitting along with the output process characterization, we propose a network-wise performance evaluation method suitable for mesh networks with a probabilistic routing algorithm to get the end-to-end delay, delay variance, and cell loss probability. With numerical experiments, we show that (i) the probabilistic routing policy with a random routing matrix performs well for systems; (ii) the proposed method of network-wise performance analysis has good accuracy. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.