A Min-Plus Calculus for End-to-End Statistical Service Guarantees

The network calculus offers an elegant framework for determining worst-case bounds on delay and backlog in a network. This paper extends the network calculus to a probabilistic framework with statistical service guarantees. The notion of a statistical service curve is presented as a probabilistic bound on the service received by an individual flow or an aggregate of flows. The problem of concatenating per-node statistical service curves to form an end-to-end (network) statistical service curve is explored. Two solution approaches are presented that can each yield statistical network service curves. The first approach requires the availability of time scale bounds at which arrivals and departures at each node are correlated. The second approach considers a service curve that describes service over time intervals. Although the latter description of service is less general, it is argued that many practically relevant service curves may be compliant to this description