Opportunistic link overbooking for resource efficiency under per-flow service guarantee

The trade-off between resource efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) is always a vital issue for communication networks, and link overbooking is a common technique used to improve resource efficiency. How to properly overbook a link and analytically determine its overbooking factor under QoS constraints are still problems, especially when achieving advanced QoS by per-flow queueing, as urged by the emerging mobilized applications in the access networks. This paper first proposes an Opportunistic Link Overbooking (OLO) scheme for an edge gateway to improve its link efficiency, and then develops an integrated analytical framework for determining the suitable link overbooking factor with service guarantee on flow level. In our scheme, once the idle time of a high priority flow's quasi-dedicated link is larger than a specified threshold, the link is temporarily overbooked to a low priority flow; and then when the high priority flow's subsequent packets start arriving, the link can be recovered at the expense of a setup delay. To explore the balance between link efficiency and the flow's QoS in the proposed scheme, we develop the corresponding queueing model under either bounded packet delay (relevant to delaysensitive flow) or finite buffer size (relevant to loss-sensitive flow). Our queueing analysis reveals the inherent trade-offs among the link overbooking factor, packet loss rate and delay/jitter under different traffic patterns.