Numerical approximation of equivalent bandwidths for general traffic streams via an on-off projection method

We propose an adaptive optimization technique to determine an equivalent bandwidth for any packet or ATM cell traffic. The technique consists of projecting the traffic onto two superimposed traffic streams: the first being a constant bit rate stream and the second an on-off stream. We apply the proposed technique to samples from video and Ethernet data collected and analyzed by previous investigators and demonstrate around 30% bandwidth reduction below the peak rate for non-multiplexed traffic for cell loss ratio of $10 sup -6$ with buffer size of 5000 cells. By applying the projection technique to synthesized data on multiplexed traffic, an order of magnitude bandwidth reduction results. We conclude that despite the characteristically non-Markovian large variances exhibited by these correlated packet data, they can be assigned equivalent bandwidths significantly lower than their peak rates.