A simple balanced fair blocking mechanism for discrete-time multiplexing of bursty traffic sources

A major challenge in the development of integrated service packet networks is to devise mechanisms that can support services with different QoS requirements. Recently, a new mechanism was developed, called weighted fair blocking (WFB), that can be placed on top of almost any discrete-time multiplexing system for controlling packet loss. The WFB mechanism has a number of attractive features. It can offer sources a range of QoS loss levels or be used as a balanced fair blocking (BFB) mechanism to equalize blocking probabilities in the interest of fairness. The BFB mechanism also reduces multiplexer buffer requirements significantly. The mechanism was derived for multiple Bernoulli sources as well as for two bursty MMBP (Markov modulated Bernoulli processes) sources. In this paper, we extend the BFB mechanism to the more realistic case of multiple MMBPs. The extension is found to be theoretically tractable but significant practical complications arise. To circumvent these difficulties, a simple heuristic BFB (H-BFB) mechanism is proposed. The performance of H-BFB is found to be remarkably good in approaching that of theoretically exact BFB from the point of view of buffer gains and fairness.