Estimating End-to-End Cell Delay Variation in ATM Networks

Cell delay variation (CDV) is one of the quality of service parameters that can be negotiated between applications and an ATM network. The network should check during connection setup, as part of call admission control, whether it can satisfy the requested CDV of an application. For this comparison, the network should estimate the end-to-end CDV that it can support, by using local information about cell delays and delay variations in switches. An accurate estimation of the end-to-end CDV is important for decreasing call-blocking probability and increasing network utilization. In this article, we will first describe, evaluate, and identify the short-comings of three proposed methods for end-to-end CDV estimation. Then we will present a new method based on Chernoff bound and compare it to the other methods. The Chernoff method is promising since it has good accuracy and applicability under current signaling support for ATM networks.