Effective bandwidth of bursty, variable rate sources for admission control to B-ISDN

A prime instrument for controlling congestion in the broadband integrated services digital network (B-ISDN) is admission control. It is shown that for the admission control of general Markovian traffic sources, it is possible to assign a notional effective bandwidth to each source which is an explicitly identified, simply computed quantity with provably correct properties in the natural asymptotic regime of small loss probabilities. It is the maximal real eigenvalue of a matrix which is directly obtained from the source characteristics and the admission criterion, and, for several sources, it is simply additive. Both fluid and point process models are considered, and parallel results are obtained. The effective-bandwidth reducing properties of the leaky bucket regulator are reported, and the leaky bucket parameters are related to the buffer requirements at the multiplexer