Performance analysis of flow aggregation of constant bit rate type traffic at ingress router

Flow aggregation will be a key technology for offering real-time communication services in large scale networks, because it can greatly reduce the flow management cost. In this paper, we exactly analyze the performance of flow aggregation of constant bit rate type traffic, especially the call blocking probability at the ingress routers. Through our numerical results, we have shown the characteristics of flow aggregation. As a result, although the flow aggregation scheme, in fact, needs more capacity than the per-flow management to achieve the same blocking probability, it enables us to manage a great number of flows of relatively small bandwidth requirements, e.g., voice flows in high speed backbone networks without much redundant capacity. Our analysis is so general that it can treat various kinds of heterogeneous cases, and helps to determine the capacity allocation to different kinds of aggregated flows.