On-line control of the threshold policy parameter for multiclass systems

Motivated by the problem of Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning, this paper investigates a system with two classes of traffic and addresses the problem of dynamically controlling the buffer threshold used with the threshold policy, such that an objective function is optimized. For the analysis, a Stochastic Fluid Model (SFM) is used to derive unbiased sensitivity estimators of various metrics (workload, loss, throughput and packet expiration) with respect to the buffer threshold. These estimators are computed using information obtained from the sample path of the “real” discrete event system. Thus, one can use these estimators together with stochastic approximation techniques in order to maintain the system at a near-optimum point despite any changes in the incoming traffic or the transmission capacity of the network.