Queueing analysis of continuous bit-stream transport in packet networks

The problem of transporting continuous bit-stream oriented (CBO) traffic through an all-packet network is examined. In the system considered, CBO traffic is packetized by collecting bits generated by a source during a fixed interval of time (packetization time) and packets from K such sources are multiplexed on a transmission link. The bit-streams are recreated at the receiving end by demultiplexing the packets and then playing out the packets of each bit-stream in sequence. The queuing system analyzed is a single-server queue with periodic arrivals and deterministic service times; the steady-state distributions of the queue length and delay are derived. The method of analysis is based on the ballot theorems and has a computational complexity of O (K), as compared to other proposed methods with complexities of O(K³) or greater. It is shown that the delay, measured in units of the packetization time, decreases as the link bandwidth increases. Therefore, for the large capacity links, the contribution of the queuing delay to the total network delay is small compared to the packetization time