On the quantitative specification of jitter constrained periodic streams

An increasing number of application systems can be characterized by their requirement to process sequences of events in real-time. These sequences are principally of constant rate, but may vary within given limits. Hence, several parameter sets that seem to differ only slightly have been proposed to describe such sequences. This includes the parameter sets used in the Tenet Protocol Suite, in the traffic description of an ATM connection, and in the model of linear bounded arrival processes (LBAP) for transferring continuous media. The existence of several parameter sets raises the question whether or not the parameter sets differ in principle or in notation only. To answer this question, the paper proposes a generalized model for jitter constrained periodic streams. That model subsumes the parameter sets mentioned above, allows to prove their equivalence and to transform the different sets of parameters each to another.