Guaranteeing statistical QoS to regulated traffic: the single node case

We design and evaluate traffic management schemes for multimedia traffic in multihop packet-switched networks. Our traffic management schemes give multimedia connections statistical quality of service (QoS) guarantees while simultaneously permitting the network to have a large connection-carrying capacity. We consider a QoS requirement that is particularly appropriate for multimedia connections which typically can tolerate some loss but have rigid delay constraints. Our design allows for connection specific end-to-end delay limits and loss bounds. In order for the network to be able to provide these statistical QoS guarantees, we assume that each connections' traffic is regulated. We propose a pragmatic scheme for multimedia traffic which consists of: 1) leaky buckets for traffic regulation, 2) smoothers at the network edges, and 3) bufferless statistical multiplexing within the network. We also develop a call admission procedure for our traffic management scheme. Finally, we compare the connection-carrying capacity of our scheme with that of guaranteed service schemes using GPS and RCS