Quantifying the throughput guarantees offered in wireless networks

Offering throughput guarantees for cellular wireless networks, carrying real-time traffic, is of interest to both the network operators and the customers. Furthermore, to be able to quantify the soft throughput guarantees for a certain scheduling algorithm without conducting experimental investigations, is valuable for network providers. In this paper, we develop an expression for the approximate throughput guarantee violation probability (TGVP) for users in time-slotted networks with the given cumulants of the distribution of the bit-rate, and a given distribution for the number of time-slots allocated within a time-window. Through simulations, it is shown that this TGVP approximation is tight for a realistic wireless network with moving users and correlated channels.