Performance of finite-buffer queues under traffic with long-range dependence

Intuition suggests that a finite buffer limits the effect of traffic auto-correlations on the queue length. We investigate the extent to which finite buffers can, therefore, be expected to mitigate the effects of long-range dependence (LRD). With traffic sequences generated by the fractional autoregressive integrated moving average (f-ARIMA) models for LRD, and by AR models for short range dependence (SRD), we investigate the traffic performance for a range of finite buffers, both for single and multiplexed streams. For design, the aim is to 'match' a given LRD auto-correlation function with a suitable SRD function whose performance provides, for a wide range of traffic intensities and buffer sizes, a conservative bound on the performance associated with the LRD function. The results suggest that by suitably 'dominating' an LRD auto-correlation function by an SRD function, one can obtain conservative performance bounds for a realistic range of traffic intensities and buffer sizes (delays). Also, in several cases, a 'cross-over' phenomenon is observed for cell-loss probabilities as the buffer size increases, i.e., the loss probabilities are smaller for LRD than for SRD for small buffers, with the converse true for large buffers. This suggests that finite buffers, can in some cases, counteract the effects of LRD in traffic arrivals, and thus enable conservative designs to be based on Markovian traffic models.