Consecutive cell loss controls for leaky-bucket admission systems

Consecutively lost cells (cell gaps) have significant impact on the quality of service provided by virtual circuits. In systems that use leaky-bucket like admission schemes the cell gap size can be controlled by controlling the number of cells that are marked for preferential discarding when bandwidth violations occur. In this paper we propose to improve cell gap performance by minimizing or maximizing the average number of consecutively marked violation cells created by generalized leaky buckets. We identify cell marking policies that minimize or maximize this average "virtual cell gap", and we present simulation results demonstrating the policies' effectiveness.