A Calculus for End-to-end Statistical Service Guarantees

The deterministic network calculus offers an elegant framework for determining delays and backlog in a network with deterministic service guarantees to individual traffic flows. A drawback of the deterministic network calculus is that it only provides worst-case bounds. Here we present a network calculus for statistical service guarantees, which can exploit the statistical multiplexing gain of sources. We introduce the notion of an effective service curve as a probabilistic bound on the service received by an individual flow, and construct an effective service curve for a network where capacities are provisioned exclusively to aggregates of flows. Numerical examples demonstrate that the calculus is able to extract a significant amount of multiplexing gain in networks with a large number of flows.

Liebeherr, Jorg, Stephen Patek, and Almut Burchard. "A Calculus for End-to-end Statistical Service Guarantees." University of Virginia Dept. of Computer Science Tech Report (2001).