On the relevance of time scales in performance oriented traffic characterizations

Efficient methods for congestion control in high-speed communication networks will be based on reasonable characterizations for traffic flows and time scale decompositions of the network dynamics. A key problem for modern network designers is to characterize/model the "bursty" traffic arising in broadband networks with a view to predicting and guaranteeing the performance. We attempt to unify several approaches ranging from histogram/interval based methods to "frequency domain" approaches by further investigating the asymptotic behavior of a multiplexer carrying a large number of streams. This analysis reveals the salient traffic/performance relationships which should guide us in selecting successful methods for traffic management and network dimensioning.