An analysis of a discrete-time queue for broadband ISDN with priorities among traffic classes

In broadband ISDN, different classes of traffic expect to receive different quality of service. One way of providing service is to implement a priority structure among traffic classes. The authors analyze a single server queue in which video and voice traffic receive priority over data traffic. Corresponding to the fixed cell size of ATM, they assume that service times are deterministic. They further assume that the high priority traffic is correlated and the arrivals are governed by a Markov chain. With these assumptions, they characterize the queue length distributions and the waiting time distributions for this problem. They show by numerical examples that the delay distribution depends highly on the correlations and that a priority service discipline is capable of providing very good service for real time traffic