An analytical paradigm to compare routing strategies in an ATM multimedia environment

We propose an analytical model for the study of two different routing strategies in an ATM network supporting multimedia traffic flow: the multimedia virtual circuit (MVC) and the independent virtual circuit (IVC). The first strategy consists of assigning a single virtual channel to all of the monomedia streams which make up the multimedia flows; the second strategy consists of multiplexing homogeneous monomedia streams belonging to different multimedia sources on the same virtual channel. With this aim, a multimedia source is modeled as an arrival process defined as the superposition of heterogeneous correlated arrival processes, each of which models one monomedia source. In order to take into account the intermedia relationships which exist in a multimedia stream, each monomedia source is modeled as an interrupted Bernoulli process in which the transition and the arrival probabilities are functions of the states of the other monomedia sources. A finite-buffer discrete-time approach is used in order to compare MVC and IVC performance when an aggregate of N heterogeneous multimedia sources loads the network. Performance is evaluated for each monomedia source in terms of loss probability and jitter probability density function. To assess the proposed paradigm, a case study is shown.