Optimal flow control schemes that regulate the burstiness of traffic

The problem of designing burst reducing flow controllers for traffic in an ATM network is studied. By requiring that the output flow obey certain burstiness constraints, it is shown that an optimal design exists and that it can be easily implemented in real time. Two versions of the problem are considered. The first one places constraints on the buffer size and the second one on the maximum delay that a cell can experience. Both problems are solved for arbitrary traffic processes. To treat the problems in this generality the authors introduce reflection mappings and use them, in a rather novel way, to establish optimality results. As a by-product of the analysis and methods, the optimality of the popular leaky bucket flow control scheme is also established