Fundamental results on the performance of ATM multiplexers with applications to video teleconferencing

The main contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, we prove fundamental, similarly behaving lower and upper bounds, and give an approximation based on the bounds, which is effective for analyzing ATM multiplexers, even when the traffic has many, possibly heterogeneous, sources and their models are of high dimension. Second, we apply our analytic approximation to statistical models of video teleconference traffic, obtain the multiplexing system's capacity as determined by the number of admissible sources for given cell loss probability, buffer size and trunk bandwidth, and, finally, compare with results from simulations, which are driven by actual data from coders. The results are surprisingly close. Our bounds are based on Large Deviations theory. Our approximation has two easily calculated parameters, one is from Chernoff's theorem and the other is the system's dominant eigenvalue. A broad range of systems are analyzed and the time for analysis in each case is a fraction of a second.