On ability of a communication channel to accommodate multimedia traffic

The throughput of a communication system serving bursty multimedia traffic can be characterized by the admission region: all possible sets of multimedia sources the system can accommodate given the sources statistical characteristics and quality of service (QoS) requirements. Since the throughput depends on the system resources (bandwidth and buffering space) as well as the resource management strategies, it is natural to define the system capacity as the upper limit on the admission region over all physically feasible strategies. This paper estimates the capacity of a buffered communication channel serving multimedia traffic with QoS requirements on the maximum allowable traffic delay and loss. The buffer is assumed large enough to make the channel capacity the limiting resource. Given the set of multimedia sources within the system capacity, the paper also discusses the scheduling disciplines that provide the required QoS