Providing performance guarantees is one of the most important issues for future telecommunication networks. This book describes theoretical developments in performance guarantees for telecommunication networks from the last decade. Written for the benefit of graduate students and scientists interested in telecommunications-network performance this book consists of two parts. The first introduces the recently-developed filtering theory for providing deterministic (hard) guarantees, such as bounded delay and queue length. The filtering theory is developed under the min-plus algebra, where one replaces the usual addition with the min operator and the usual multiplication with the addition operator. As in the classical linear system theory, the filtering theory treats an arrival process (or a departure process ) as a signal and a network element as a system. Network elements, including traffic regulators and servers, can be modelled as linear filters under the min-plus algebra, and they can be joined by concatenation, "filter bank summation", and feedback to form a composite network element. The problem of providing deterministic guarantees is equivalent to finding the impulse response of composite network elements. This section contains material on: - (s, r)-calculus - Filtering theory for deterministic traffic regulation, service guarantees and networks with variable-length packets - Traffic specification - Networks with multiple inputs and outputs - Constrained traffic regulation The second part of the book addresses stochastic (soft) guarantees, focusing mainly on tail distributions of queue lengths and packet loss probabilities and contains material on: - (s(q), r(q))-calculus and q-envelope rates - The large deviation principle - The theory of effective bandwidth The mathematical theory for stochastic guarantees is the theory of effective bandwidth. Based on the large deviation principle, the theory of effective bandwidth provides approximations for the bandwidths required to meet stochastic guarantees for both short-range dependent inputs and long-range dependent inputs.

The increasing importance of distributed multimedia applications and the emergence of user interfaces based on digital audio and digital video will soon require that computer communications networks offer real-time services. This paper argues that the feasibility of providing performance guarantees in a wide-area network should be investigated, and describes a possible approach. We present a model of the network to be studied, and discuss its generality, as well as the presumable limits to its validity in the future. We also give a careful formulation of the problem, including a precise definition of the guarantees to be provided and a provably correct scheme for the establishment of real- time connections with deterministic, statistical, and best-effort delay buonds.

The contract can be sub-divided into three major components, a conventional component that describes the obligations of the network to provide a conventional connection oriented service not involving any performance guarantees, a traffic component that describes the obligations of the application to the network, and a performance component which describes the obligations of the network to the application. Within each of the three components of the contract, four problems need to be addressed. We need to define the terms of the contract, which would be signed by the application and the network.

With the diversification of Internet services and the increase in mobile users, efficient management of network resources has become an extremely important issue in the field of wireless communication networks (WCNs). Adaptive resource management is an effective tool for improving the economic efficiency of WCN systems as well as network design and construction, especially in view of the surge in mobile device demands. This book presents modelling methods based on queueing theory and Markov processes for a wide variety of WCN systems, as well as precise and approximate analytical solution methods for the numerical evaluation of the system performance. This is the first book to provide an overview of the numerical analyses that can be gleaned by applying queueing theory, traffic theory and other analytical methods to various WCN systems. It also discusses the recent advances in the resource management of WCNs, such as broadband wireless access networks, cognitive radio networks, and green cloud computing. It assumes a basic understanding of computer networks and queueing theory, and familiarity with stochastic processes is also recommended. The analysis methods presented in this book are useful for first-year-graduate or senior computer science and communication engineering students. Providing information on network design and management, performance evaluation, queueing theory, game theory, intelligent optimization, and operations research for researchers and engineers, the book is also a valuable reference resource for students, analysts, managers and anyone in the industry interested in WCN system modelling, performance analysis and numerical evaluation.