Delay jitter first-order statistical function in high-speed multi-media networks

Delay jitter is a measure of cell delay variation (CDV) in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. We develop an analytic approximation for the first-order statistics of the delay jitter experienced by a stationary traffic stream multiplexed at a major communication node; this approximation is then used to gain insight into the behavior of jitter at a single node under diverse system and traffic conditions. Our construction applies when the node can be modeled as a finite quasi-birth-death (QBD) process and the interarrival time probability density function for the tagged stream is obtainable. Assumptions are made based on the requirement that the tagged stream be multiplexed with much other traffic; we note that under such circumstances jitter will be of greatest concern in a high-speed network. The analytic approximations are supported by simulation and enable us to examine jitter behavior in a rather general queueing environment. We compare the jitter performance of three different tagged streams: periodic, Poisson, and on/off binary Markov process (BMP). Because jitter behavior is most deleterious for the former, we study the individual effects of various system and traffic parameters on the jitter statistics of a periodic stream multiplexed in an MMPP/M/1/K system. To demonstrate the flexibility of this analytic technique, we also consider a JPEG coded video stream multiplexed with JPEG, MPEG, and data sources on an OC-12 line