Capacity allocation in statistical multiplexing of ATM sources

The authors are concerned with the allocation of the available capacity of a statistical multiplexer to serve a number of heterogeneous on-off sources, with the cell loss rate as the performance criterion. In order to avoid using potentially lengthy simulations, they have derived computationally efficient bounds and asymptotic approximations for the cell loss rate. The union of all partitions of the available capacity which satisfies the capacity bound and the performance criterion is defined as the capacity region. Both linear approximation and nonlinear approximation of the capacity region are investigated. It is shown that the linear approximation is reasonably accurate when the activity factors of the sources are not too high (less than 0.8). For the case where the linear approximation appears too optimistic, a simple nonlinear approximation for determining the capacity region is suggested. The accuracy of the method is demonstrated using numerical examples