Design and analysis of a buffer management scheme for multimedia traffic with loss and delay priorities

Future broadband networks (e.g., BISDN/ATM) will provide transport for a wide range of applications that vary in their quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Such requirements are measured by the cell loss rate and the end-to-end delay (or delay variation). This paper presents an analysis of a buffer management scheme known as nested threshold cell discarding with multiple buffers. NTCD/MB implements loss and delay priority queueing strategies in order to satisfy a wide range of quality-of-service requirements. We consider a heterogeneous mix of traffic which consists of real-time and nonreal-time traffic types. A proportion of the real-time traffic is loss-sensitive. Cell arrivals are modeled using the fluid-flow approach. The system we analyze consists of two buffers interacting via a common server. The steady-state probability distribution for the content of the buffers is reported along with other performance statistics. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of NTCD/MB in simultaneously providing loss and delay performance guarantees.