Simple Approximations of Performance Metrics for a link integrating elastic and streaming traffic

Overview & Synopsis

We consider a flow-level model of a single-bottleneck link where elastic flows compete with fixed-rate streaming flows. We assume that a call-admission control mechanism is used to limit the overall volume of streaming traffic. We further assume that streaming flows are served with priority, the remaining bandwidth being fairly shared by elastic flows according to Balanced Fairness. We derive exact performance results for streaming flows, and propose two different approximations for elastic flows. The first approximation provides insensitive performance bounds, whereas the second one is based on a quasi-stationary assumption. Simulation results show that the performances are well estimated with the proposed approximations.