Analysis of stochastic service guarantees in communication networks: A traffic model

The arrival curve has been used as a powerful concept for deterministic service guarantee analysis in communication networks. Since many applications and networks do not require or provide deterministic service guarantees, stochastic service guarantee analysis is becoming increasingly important and has attracted a lot of research attention in recent years. For this, several probabilistic versions of the arrival curve have been proposed in the literature. They extend the concept of arrival curve to the stochastic case based on its traffic amount property. In this paper, we explore another property, called the virtual backlog property, of an arrival curve. Based on the virtual backlog property, we introduce the concept of virtual-backlog-centric (v.b.c) stochastic arrival curve to facilitate the analysis of stochastic service guarantees. We prove that a v.b.c stochastic arrival curve has a similar duality as a (deterministic) arrival curve. With the concept of v.b.c stochastic arrival curve, we derive results for stochastic service guarantee analysis of systems with the time-varying setting. In addition, we prove that many well-known types of traffic can be readily represented using v.b.c stochastic arrival curves.