On Generalized Processor Sharing With Regulated Multimedia Traffic Flows

Multimedia traffic is becoming an increasing portion of today´s Internet traffic due to the flourishing of multimedia applications such as music/video streaming, video teleconferencing, IP telephony, and distance learning. In this paper, we study the problem of supporting multimedia traffic using a generalized processor sharing (GPS) server. By examining the sample path behavior and exploring the inherent feasible ordering of the classes, we derive tight performance bounds on backlog and delay for regulated multimedia traffic classes in a GPS system. Our approach is quite general since we do not assume any arriving traffic model or any specific traffic regulator, other than that each traffic flow is deterministically regulated. Such deterministic regulators, as well as approximations of the GPS server, are widely implemented in commercial routers. In addition, our analysis is very accurate and achieves a high utilization of the server capacity, since we exploit the independence among the traffic flows for higher statistical multiplexing gains. Numerical examples and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and merits of our approach, which is practical and well suited for supporting multimedia applications in the Internet