Quality of service parameters and link operation point estimation based on effective bandwidth

Abstract

This work addresses the estimation and calculation of the operating point of a networks link in a digital traffic network. The notion of operating point comes from Effective Bandwidth (EB) theory. The results are valid for a wide range of traffic types. This means that the statistical characteristics of the traffic may be very general. We show that, given a good EB estimator, the operating point, i.e. the values of time and space (or multiplexing) parameters in which the EB gives the asymptotic overflow probability, can also be accurately estimated. Imposing some regularity conditions, a consistent estimator and confidence intervals of the operating point are developed. These conditions are very general, and they are met by commonly used estimators as the averaging estimator presented in [2] or the Markov Fluid model estimator presented in [10]. Using a software package developed by our workgroup that estimates the EB and other relevant parameters from tra±c traces, simulation results are compared with the analytical results, showing very good fitting. Keywords. Traffic modelling, traffic estimation, effective bandwidths, QoS, MPLS, operating point estimation.