Effective bandwidth of general Markovian traffic sources and admission control of high speed networks

A prime instrument for controlling congestion in high-speed broadband ISDN (BISDN) networks is admission control, which limits call and guarantees a grade of service determined by delay and loss probability in the multiplexer. It is shown, for general Markovian traffic sources, that it is possible to assign a notational effective bandwidth to each source which is an explicitly identified, simply computing quantity with provably correct properties in the natural asymptotic regime of small loss probabilities. It is the maximal real eigenvalue of a matrix which is directly obtained from the source characteristics and the admission criterion, and for several sources it is simply additive. Both fluid and point process models are considered, and parallel results are obtained. Numerical results show that the acceptance set for heterogeneous classes of sources is closely approximated and conservatively bounded by the set obtained from the effective bandwidth approximation.<<ETX>>