Analysis of packet loss in a continuous‐time finite‐buffer queue with multimedia traffic streams

Abstract

The main peculiarity of multimedia services is the presence of intermedia relationships, that is, time relationships between the various media making up the multimedia stream. These, in fact, affect the characteristics of the traffic offered to the network and therefore they have to be taken into account when network resource allocation and management strategies are investigated. To achieve this aim we propose, in this study, to model a multimedia source as the superposition of heterogeneous correlated ON–OFF processes, each of which models a monomedia source in a continuous-time environment. The performance of a finite-size queue driven by a number of heterogeneous multimedia sources modelled according to the proposed paradigm is studied. Finally, assuming a master/slave relationship between the monomedia streams composing the multimedia stream, a case study is presented in order to show how intermedia relationships and their effects on buffer performance can be described through the auto- and crosscorrelation functions of the compound processes and the autocorrelation function of the multimedia source as a whole. ©1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.