Abstract
We examine the properties of a promising new traffic descriptor for ATM networks, namely the entropy of cell streams. The entropy is a measure of the disorganization among cells within a traffic stream; alternatively we can say that entropy captures the amount of randomness in cell scattering. We study the entropy of ON-OFF sources with respect to the typical queue parameters of interest: average queue size, queue variance and equivalent buffers. The equivalent buffer is defined as the minimum buffer size needed to achieve a specific loss probability. We demonstrate that the average queue size and the variance of queue size are monotonically decreasing with increasing entropy in streams with the same fixed load. We find that the inverse of the entropy is closely linear, to within a good approximation, to the equivalent buffer. This simple relation demonstrates the appeal of the entropy estimator. In addition to a measure of cell scattering, our results suggest another interpretation of entropy as a measure of smoothness. Traffic streams with higher entropy (i.e. smoother) have less buffering needs in terms of average, variance and equivalent buffers. Based on this observation we introduce a traffic shaping mechanism whose goal is to boost the entropy of a stream.
This work was carried out while this author was a visiting researcher at the Laboratoire MASI at Université Paris VI.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bruneel, H. and Kim, B. (1994) Communications Systems Including ATM Kluwer Academic Publishers.
CCITT Recommendation I.371 (1992) Traffic control and congestion control in B-ISDN. Geneva, Switzerland. June.
Cover, T. and Thomas, J. (1991) Elements of Information Theory. Wiley.
Eckberg, A. (1992) B-ISDN/ATM Traffic and Congestion Control. IEEE Network Magazine, September, 6 (5): 28–37.
Floyd, S. and Jacobson, V. (1993) The Synchronization of Periodic Routing Messages. ACM SigComm Proceedings, September.
Guerin, R. and Ahmadi, H. and Naghshineh, M. (1991) Equivalent Capacity and Its Application to Bandwidth Allocation in High-Speed Networks. IEEE Journal On Selected Areas in Communications, September.
Leland, W. and Tagqu, M. and Willinger, W.and Wilson, D. (1993) On the Self-Similar Nature of Ethernet Traffic. ACM SigComm Proceedings, September.
Low, S. and Varaiya, P. (1993) Burstiness Bounds for Some Burst Reducing Servers. IEEE InfoCom’93 Proceedings, March.
Plotkin, N. and Varaiya, P. (1994) The Entropy of Traffic Streams in ATM Virtual Circuits. IEEE InfoCom’94 Proceedings, June.
Takagi, H. (1993) Queueing Analysis Volume 3: Discrete-Time Systems. Elsevier Science. Taft-Plotkin, N. (1994) High-Speed Network Traffic: Characterization and Control. PhD Thesis, University of California, Berkeley.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Plotkin, N.T., Roche, C. (1996). The Entropy of Cell Streams as a Traffic Descriptor in ATM Networks. In: Fdida, S., Onvural, R.O. (eds) Data Communications and their Performance. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34942-8_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34942-8_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-4908-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-34942-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive