Sharp Bounds in Stochastic Network Calculus

Abstract: The practicality of the stochastic network calculus (SNC) is often questioned on grounds of potential looseness of its performance bounds. In this paper it is uncovered that for bursty arrival processes (specifically Markov-Modulated On-Off (MMOO)), whose amenability to \textit{per-flow} analysis is typically proclaimed as a highlight of SNC, the bounds can unfortunately indeed be very loose (e.g., by several orders of magnitude off). In response to this uncovered weakness of SNC, the (Standard) per-flow bounds are herein improved by deriving a general sample-path bound, using martingale based techniques, which accommodates FIFO, SP, EDF, and GPS scheduling. The obtained (Martingale) bounds gain an exponential decay factor of ${\mathcal{O}}(e^{-\alpha n})$ in the number of flows $n$. Moreover, numerical comparisons against simulations show that the Martingale bounds are remarkably accurate for FIFO, SP, and EDF scheduling; for GPS scheduling, although the Martingale bounds substantially improve the Standard bounds, they are numerically loose, demanding for improvements in the core SNC analysis of GPS.