Equivalent capacity estimators for bufferless fluid flow multiplexing

The paper is concerned with the approximation of equivalent capacity in the context of bufferless fluid flow multiplexing (BFFM) based on parsimonious characterization of traffic flows, i.e., only the number of flows, the peak arrival rates and the aggregate mean arrival rate are assumed to be known. In bufferless statistical multiplexing, a main stream of research investigates the phenomenon that the combined arrival rate of flows multiplexed on a transmission link exceeds the total link capacity. In the widely studied BFFM model, important QoS measures are often considered, such as saturation probability and workload loss ratio, and, based on these measures, the corresponding minimum transmission capacity required by the flow aggregate. New and direct estimators for the equivalent capacity are presented and compared to previously developed ones; their significance in call admission control is also highlighted. To that end we also perform different approximations of the probability generating functions of the rate distribution of the aggregate flow; they are often essential parts of QoS measure estimates.