A Performance Model for Multimedia Services Provisioning on Network Interfaces

This paper presents a method for the performance evaluation of multimedia streaming applications on IP network interfaces with differentiated scheduling. Streaming applications are characterized by the emission of data packets at constant intervals, changing during the connection lifetime, hence a single source can be effectively modeled by an MMDP. We propose an MMDP/D/1/K model to represent the aggregate arrival process and the network interface, assuming that multimedia packet dimensions are approximately constant. A method for solving the above queuing system providing upper and lower bounds to the packet loss rate is presented and results for realistic VoIP applications are discussed and validated against accurate event-driven simulations showing the efficiency and accuracy of the method.