Improving Utilization for Deterministic Service 
                 In Multimedia Communication

                 Hui Zhang and Domenico Ferrari
                     
Network-based real-time multimedia applications require guaranteed performance
communication services. To provide guaranteed service, resources have to be 
reserved  within the  network.  One important consideration about any 
resource reservation scheme is whether it can achieve a high utilization 
of the  network. If reservation is based on the peak rate of each connection, 
new requests will be rejected when the  sum of the peak rates of all the 
connections reaches the link speed.  In this case, the network will be 
under-utilized by  guaranteed  service  traffic when the traffic is bursty 
or the peak-to-average-rate ratio of the traffic is high. In this paper, we 
first show that local deterministic  delay  bounds  can  be guaranteed  over 
a link for bursty traffic even when the sum of  the peak rates of all
the connections is greater than the link speed.  Compared  to  previous
admission  control  conditions,  the new  result  allows  a  multi-fold
increase in the number of admitted connections when the traffic is bursty.
We then show that this new result can be  efficiently extended from 
a single switch to a network of arbitrary topology by using rate-controlled
service disciplines at the switches.