Dimensioning leaky buckets in stochastic environments

Leaky buckets are commonly used for access control in networks, where access control stands for traffic regulation at the ingress of the network. In network calculus, which is often applied for performance analysis or dimensioning of networks, leaky buckets are the model behind piecewise linear arrival curves that specify an input bound to a network. In this paper we present the analysis of leaky bucket based access control under stochastic arrivals using fluid queues, when the access control is implemented by possibly more than one leaky buckets. This results in methods to dimension parameters of access control for different stochastic arrival processes including correlated arrivals. The approach is one step to bridge the gap between classical stochastic analysis using queuing networks and deterministic analysis using network calculus. Results are presented for stochastic arrival processes using numerical methods and for measured arrivals using trace driven simulation.