User-level performance of elastic traffic in a differentiated-services environment

We consider a system with two service classes, one of which supports elastic traffic. The traffic characteristics of the other class can be completely general, allowing streaming applications as an important special case. The link capacity is shared between the two traffic classes in accordance with the Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS) discipline. GPS-based scheduling algorithms, such as Weighted Fair Queueing, provide a flexible mechanism for service differentiation and prioritization. We examine the user-level performance of the elastic traffic. The elastic traffic users randomly initiate file transfers with a heavy-tailed distribution. Within the elastic traffic class, the active flows share the available bandwidth in an ordinary Processor-Sharing (PS) fashion. The PS discipline has emerged as a natural paradigm for evaluating the user-perceived performance of bandwidth sharing algorithms like TCP. For a certain parameter range, we establish that the transfer delay incurred by the elastic traffic flows is asymptotically equivalent to that in an isolated PS system with constant service rate. This service rate is only affected by the streaming traffic through its average rate. Specifically, the elastic traffic is largely immune from possible adverse traffic characteristics or performance degradation due to prioritization of the streaming traffic. This confirms that GPS-based multiplexing mechanisms achieve significantly better performance for both traffic classes than a static bandwidth partitioning approach.