Link Sizing for Multi-Media Traffic Transported over IP

The objective of this study is to develop a model for multiplexed traffic carried over IP. The traffic carried by IP networks is expected to be a mixture of low speed voice and data traffic, along with high-speed video, images, and interactive traffic. At the present time, several classes of traffic streams with widely varying characteristics are multiplexed and share common transmission resources. When traffic streams are multiplexed, their aggregate statistical behavior differs, and usually more complicated to model, from their individual statistical behavior. A challenging problem is to characterize, as a function of the desired Quality of Service (QoS), the effective bandwidth requirements of the aggregate bandwidth usage of streams multiplexed on a given link. So far, we have developed a model for this type of traffic mixture and produced simulation results. Next, we plan to study analytical behavior of such kind of multiplexed traffic and compare it to the simulation results.