Integrated Transmission of Mixed Communication Traffic Types with Different Bandwidth Requirements

摘要

The author considers an integrated scheme for multiplexing two types of nonqueueing traffic (i.e., voice and video) with different statistics and grades of service. Attention is directed to a particular node of the system with a total available bandwidth of C frequency slots with each slot accommodating only one customer. When a customer arrives at the node, it is either immediately given a slot or else is blocked for one of the following reasons: either there is no available frequency slot or it is worthwhile reserving an empty slot for a customer of the other type since blocking the latter (at a later time) would incur a greater cost. The problem is formulated in terms of a Markov Decision process where the (multiplexing) actions consist of accepting or blocking a customer at the instant of its arrival into the system. Our objective is to determine a multiplexing scheme for allocating bandwidth among the two types of customers so as to minimize a weighted sum of the respective blocking probabilities.