In this letter a general admission control strategy is proposed and mathematically analyzed. Fractional buffering finely adjusts different QoS metrics allowing them to simultaneously achieve their maximum acceptable values, maximizing system capacity. Fractional buffering also allows the adequate and fair performance comparison among different resource management strategies and/or evaluation scenarios.

In this paper, performance analysis of a cognitive radio network is conducted. In the network, there is imperfect sensing and the wireless channel is a Gilbert-Elliott channel. The focus is on the network's capacity in serving traffic with delay constraints. Specifically, the maximum traffic arrival rates of both primary users and secondary users, which the network can support with guaranteed delay bounds, are investigated. The analysis is based on stochastic network calculus. A general relationship between delay bounds, traffic patterns and important characteristics such as spectrum sensing errors and channel fading of the cognitive radio network is derived. This relationship lays a foundation for finding the capacity under different traffic scenarios. Two specific traffic types are exemplified, namely periodic traffic and Poisson traffic. Analytical results are presented in comparison with simulation results. The comparison shows a good match between them, validating the analysis.

The problem of finding a minimum-cast multicast tree (Steiner tree) is known as NP complete. Heuristic based algorithms for this problem to achieve good performance are usually time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a new strategy called tree-caching for efficient multicast connection setup in connection-oriented networks. In this scheme, the tree topologies that have been computed are cached in a database of the source nodes. This can reduce the connection establishment time for subsequent connection requests which have some common multicast members, by an efficient reuse of cached trees without having to re-run a multicast routing algorithm for the whole group. This method can provide an efficient way to eliminate, when ever possible, the expensive tree computation algorithm that has to be performed in setting up a multicast connection. We first formulate the problem of tree-caching and then propose a tree-caching algorithm to reduce the complexity of the tree computations when a new connection is to be established. Through simulations, we find that the proposed tree-caching strategy performs very well and can significantly reduce the computation complexity for setting up multicast connections.

Many new multimedia applications involve multiple dynamically changing participants, have stringent source-to-end delay requirements, and consume large amounts of network resources. A conventional algorithm that allows "two coming paths," where nodes in a multicast tree transmit several identical data flows, is therefore not practical. We have developed an algorithm for delay-constrained dynamic routing. This algorithm uses a QoS label to prevent the occurrence of "two coming paths," and can construct an efficient multicast tree for any traffic volume. The proposed algorithm was superior to conventional routing algorithms in terms of cost when nodes were added to or removed from the multicast group during a steady-state simulation.

In live multimedia applications with multiple videos, it is necessary to develop an efficient mechanism of multiplexing several MPEG video streams into a single stream and transmitting it over network without wasting excessive bandwidth. In this paper, we present an efficient multiplexing and traffic smoothing scheme for multiple variable bit rate (VBR) MPEG video streams in live video applications with finite buffer sizes. First, we describe the constraints imposed by the allowable delay bound for each elementary stream and by the multiplexer/receiver buffer sizes. Based on these constraints, a new multiplexing and traffic smoothing scheme is designed in such a way as to smooth maximally the multiplexed transmission rate by exploiting temporal and spatial averaging effects, while avoiding the buffer overflow and underflow. Through computer experiments based on an MPEG-coded video trace of Star-wars, it is shown that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the peak rate, coefficient of variation, and effective bandwidth of the multiplexed transmission rate.