Worst case traffic from regulated sources (Q1416675)

The paper deals with the finding of a traffic with the highest effective bandwidth -- a concept arising in the large deviation theory -- that a user of a telecommunications network can send, i.e. with the finding of the worst traffic. The traffic is assumed to be stationary and to satisfy ``leaky bucket'' constraints. Firstly the mentioned optimization problem is reduced to an optimization problem over periodic traffic sources. Then, using convexity methods, it is shown that the realizations of a worst case source must have the following properties: at each instant the transmission rate must be either zero, the peak rate, or the leaky bucket rate; it may only be the latter when the leaky bucket is empty or full; each burst of activity must either start with the leaky bucket empty or end with it full.