D-BIND: an accurate traffic model for providing QoS guarantees to VBR traffic

Variable bit-rate traffic that requires a bounded-delay network service is one of the most important types of traffic in future integrated services networks. We introduce a new deterministic traffic model called deterministic bounding interval-length dependent (D-BIND) to capture the important multiplexing properties of bursty streams. With the D-BIND model, clients specify their traffic to the network via multiple rate-interval pairs (R/sub k/, I/sub k/), where a rate R/sub k/ is a bounding or worst case rate over every interval of length I/sub k/. The model captures the intuitive property that, over longer interval lengths, a source may be bounded by a rate lower than its peak rate and closer to its long-term average rate. We analyze the new model in the context of a deterministic service, and we quantify its performance benefits using a set of experiments with traces of MPEG-compressed video. We show that D-BIND's more accurate characterization of traffic streams leads to substantial improvements in network utilization as compared to previous traffic models.