An approach to the design of high speed networks for bursty traffic

The class of message flows that satisfy the condition that the amount of traffic in an interval is upper bounded by an affine function of the length of the interval has been found to be a useful class of models for traffic on internal links in networks that have to handle bursty traffic. We make the key observation that there is a simple recursively updatable number, which we call the virtual backlog, which plays the role of a state for these models, in that it completely summarizes the information gained at any time by having observed the flow and can be recursively updated. This allows the formulation of control and resource allocation problems at nodes within the network as a stochastic game