Study of the Effect of the Wireless Gateway on Incoming Self-Similar Traffic

It has been well established by now that high-speed wireline traffic exhibits self-similar behavior. Due to the important consequences of traffic self-similarity in network design, several studies have assumed that wireless traffic is also self-similar and looked at its effects on network performance. However, due to factors such as power limitations and the wireless channel, it is not straightforward that wireline traffic will remain self-similar as it enters the wireless network. This paper provides an analytical study of the propagation of traffic characteristics as wireline traffic is passed to the wireless network through a gateway. The analysis takes into account buffering and repacking operations performed at the gateway, and models for wireline traffic and the wireless channel. We consider two server models, an instant transfer model, and an energy-conserving one. We show that in most cases, in response to self-similar wireline traffic the gateway will produce self-similar wireless traffic. However, when the gateway operates under an energy-conserving mode and if it has a large buffer, wireline traffic such as non-real-time variable-bit-rate traffic will result in non-self-similar wireless traffic. We also study the delays of packets passing through a gateway that is fed by self-similar traffic and show that their survival function has an asymptotically power-law tail with index smaller than 2