Jitter at an ATM multiplexer in the presence of correlated sources

The paper discusses the traffic distortion suffered by a periodic source at an ATM multiplexer, in the presence of interfering ON-OFF sources. We analyze a FIFO queue that serves the superposition of the periodic source and background traffic to obtain the jitter density. Traffic distortion is not limited to periodic sources alone. We relax the requirement of periodicity and investigate the jitter of any arbitrary renewal traffic stream. We observe that the jitter is very sensitive to the number of ON-OFF sources in addition to the variability of each source. We show that cells belonging to the periodic source cluster together for high values of the mean burst duration of the interfering ON-OFF sources. This distortion in traffic characteristics manifests in increased bandwidth requirements at the latter multiplexing stages of the connection. We also show that the departure distribution of any arbitrary renewal arrival process bears little resemblance to the original arrival distribution in the presence of highly bursty back ground traffic streams. It is clear that while statistical multiplexing enables efficient and cost effective transport, jitter control at the intermediate switching points is necessary for guaranteeing the QOS requirements of real time traffic.<<ETX>>