A recursive formula for multirate systems with elastic traffic

We present a recursive formula for evaluating the per-flow throughput in a multirate system with elastic traffic, which is the analogue of the well-known Kaufman-Roberts formula used to evaluate the blocking probability in a multirate system with circuit traffic. Such a system is representative of a link in a packet-switched network like the Internet where data flows are not blocked in case of congestion but experience lower bit rates. The maximum bit rate of each flow typically corresponds to the speed of the user access line such as the DSL access lines.