Quality-of-service dependent traffic regulation for multimedia networks

In multimedia networks, certain applications (e.g., voice and video sessions) can tolerate some delay violations and packet losses. For these applications, in [2] we proposed a novel, more flexible traffic characterization approach-Lp-sense constraint functions-as a generalization of deterministic constraint function. Intuitively, feeding more packets than provided resources will degrade the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of multimedia applications. However, if we can control a multimedia application’s output to conform to constraint functions in L* sense, then the portion of time prone to performance-bound violations has a normalized tail bound decaying with x-P. With the notion of LP-sense traffic characterization, we investigate algorithms to shape an arbitrary arrival trace to conform to a given function f in LP sense, i.e., LP-sense regulation algorithms. It can be shown that under certain conditions LP-sense regulation departure times converge to deterministic regulation departure times when p + CO. Hence LP-sense regulators can be regarded as generalizations of the continuous-time optimal deterministic regulators discussed in [3]. By properly choosing p, more packets of a multimedia source can pass through LP-sense regulators while its normalized bound-violation ratio decays fast enough to meet its QoS requirements. The basic “leaky bucket” type LP-sense regulators are also studied as an illustration.