Fundamental limits of traffic regulation and their connections to source coding

In this paper, we explore the analogy between queueing theory and information theory, especially in traffic regulation and source coding. We consider a traffic regulation problem, where an input sequence is mapped to an output sequence. The rate of a regulator is defined to be the “peak” rate of the output sequence and the performance of a regulator is in terms of loss probability. Under our formulation, we show theorems that are analogous to Shannon´s source coding theorem and the universal block coding theorem. For real-time traffic regulators that have a maximum delay constraint the trade-off between delay and loss probability is characterized by the recently developed notion of effective bandwidth