The required capacity distribution for the patching bandwidth sharing technique

In the past few years, several bandwidth sharing techniques for multimedia servers have been proposed in the literature. Among those, the patching technique has several advantages such as: simplicity of implementation and efficiency. Recently, a simple expression to estimate the average bandwidth required by the patching technique has been obtained in the literature. However, average values do not always provide an accurate estimation of the required bandwidth. We propose an analytical model to compute the distribution of the capacity required by the patching technique. We study the sensitivity of the distribution function of the capacity required by the method with respect to the size of the patching window. We also investigate the adequacy of using average parameter values to dimension the server.