Impact of self-similarity on performance evaluation in differential service networks

Priority queueing has currently become a popular research topic as a low-cost effective method to enable both quality of service (QoS) and differential services (DS) over large-scale high-speed networks. However, there are so many uncertain issues that require further investigation before its deployment into real wide area networks (WAN). The impacts of self-similar traffic on network performance has received much attention recently, however the effects of DS deployment on self-similar traffic networks has not been fully investigated yet. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to study QoS measures in priority queues under self-similar traffic. We first introduce the techniques that we use to generate self-similar network traffic, as well as the methods of how to design and implement priority queues through OPNET. Then we present our statistical results from a simulation study with synthesized self-similar traffic. Our study results show that self-similar traffic, compared with traditional short-range dependent (SRD) models, requires longer queues and thus larger buffers in the DS network design.