Traffic Characterization and Switch Utilization using a
       Deterministic Bounding Interval Dependent Traffic Model


		        Edward W. Knightly 
                         EECS Department
                University of California, Berkeley

                               and

			    Hui Zhang
                    School of Computer Science
	            Carnegie Mellon University


Compressed digital video is one of the most important types of traffic
in future integrated services networks. It is difficult to support this
class of traffic since, on one hand, compressed video is bursty, while
on the other hand, it requires performance guarantees from the network.
The common belief is that we are unlikely to achieve a high network
utilization while providing performance guarantees to such bursty
sources. In this paper, we introduce a new Deterministic Bounding
Interval-Dependent (D-BIND) traffic model, together with tight analysis
techniques, to explore the possibility of providing deterministic
performance guarantees to VBR traffic while still achieving a
reasonable network utilization.  The D-BIND model consists of a family
of rate-interval pairs where the rate is a bounding rate over the
interval length. The model captures the intuitive property that over
longer interval lengths, a source may be bounded by a rate lower than
its peak rate and closer to its long-term average rate.  While the
D-BIND model is a general deterministic model that can be used to
characterize a wide variety of sources, in this study, we focus on
MPEG-compressed video. Using two 10 minute traces, we demonstrate the
effectiveness of the new model and show that, contrary to common
belief, reasonable network utilization can be achieved for compressed
video, even when deterministic guarantees are provided.