The relevance of the bufferless analysis for traffic management in telecommunication networks

We study analysis methods for the dimensioning of switched or routed networks to determine sufficient link capacity that can guarantee small loss probabilities as a main quality of service requirement. The bufferless case is considered, motivated by a far simpler analysis as compared to queueing models but also by the inefficiency of buffering to achieve low cell or packet loss rates in the presence of real-time constraints and/or long range dependencies in the development of the traffic load. Statistical multiplexing assures quality of service at reasonable bandwidth utilization with a minimum of buffering under fairly general conditions. For voice traffic we show that at most a few percent of bandwidth is gained by buffering, as also expected for data applications revealing self-similar properties over several time scales.