Blocking probability of heterogeneous traffic in a multirate multicast switch

A multirate multicast switch, which can provide a single uniform switching function for vastly different classes of traffic, is crucial for the successful deployment of integrated broadband networks. We analyze the call blocking probability of heterogeneous circuit switched traffic in a multirate multicast switch using the arrival modulation technique. For the analysis, we introduce two simple traffic models: fan-out heterogeneous traffic and bandwidth heterogeneous traffic. The analysis of two simplified traffic models shows that calls of different characteristics interact in complex yet subtle ways. Our results on fan-out heterogeneous traffic show that the performance gap between large fan-out traffic and small fan-out traffic increases when two types of traffic are mixed. On the other hand, in bandwidth heterogeneous traffic, the performance gap between traffic of different bandwidth decreases. A further investigation indicates that the two types of interactions coexist in general heterogeneous traffic. We conclude the paper introducing several methods to improve the performance of multirate multicast traffic