Deterministic characterization and network utilizations for several distributed real-time applications

In this paper, we investigate several distributed real-time applications. The applications are real-time in that they require per-connection end-to-end performance bounds. These bounds, in terms of throughput, delay, and delay-jitter, are provided by the network via two mechanisms: admission control to limit access to the network and priority scheduling to enforce the guarantees. Within this framework, we perform a deterministic analysis on the applications and investigate, via the admission control criteria, the resulting utilization of the network. A deterministic analysis must analyze the worst-case properties of the sources in order to provide absolute bounds on throughput and delay. Three distributed real-time applications are analyzed in this paper: a video conferencing tool, a tool for combustion modeling using distributed computing, and an MPEG video archival system. Each has minimum performance requirements that must be provided by the network. By investigating these applications, we provide insights to the traffic characteristics and achievable network utilizations for practical real-time loads.