A framework for guaranteeing statistical QoS

Continuous-media traffic (i.e., audio and video) can tolerate some loss but have rigid delay constraints. A natural QoS requirement for a continuous-media connection is a prescribed limit on the fraction of traffic that exceeds an end-to-end delay constraint. We propose and analyze a framework that provides such a statistical QoS guarantee to traffic in a packet-switched network. Providing statistical guarantees in a network is a notoriously difficult problem because traffic flows lose their original statistical characterizations at the outputs of queues. Our scheme uses bufferless statistical multiplexing combined with cascaded leaky buckets for smoothing and traffic contracting. This scheme along with a novel method for bounding the loss probability gives a tractable framework for providing end-to-end statistical QoS. Using MPEG video traces, we present numerical results that compare the connection-carrying capacity of our scheme with that of guaranteed service schemes (i.e., no loss) using GPS and RCS. Our numerical work indicates that our scheme can support significantly more connections without introducing significant traffic loss.