Th`ese de Doctorat de l'université Paris VI Pierre et Marie Curie Mlle ...

Utility Function Types
In a multi-application network environment, different types of utility functions (concave,
step, s-shaped, linear, etc.) are envisioned and have been qualitatively described in [10, 11].
Applications can be classified based on their nature. Applications that generate data
independently of the current network state are called real-time applications. These ap-
plications can be further classified into real-time applications with hard requirements and
less stringent requirements, respectively. The latter ones are called adaptive real-time
applications.
On the other hand, applications that can adapt their data generation rate according to
the network conditions are called elastic applications.
Traditional data applications like file transfer, electronic mail, and remote terminal are
examples of elastic applications. These applications are rather tolerant to network delay
and present a decreasing utility improvement like that illustrated in Figure 2.1(a).
On the other hand, some applications are characterized by hard real-time requirements
(e.g. guaranteed bandwidth, very low delay and jitter). Examples of such applications
are link emulation, IP telephony, and other applications that expect circuit-switched-like
service.
For applications with hard real-time requirements, the typical utility function is repre-
sented in Figure 2.1(b): while the minimum guaranteed bandwidth is met, the application
performance is constant, but as soon as the allocated bandwidth drops below such mini-
mum, the performance falls sharply to zero.
Traditionally, video and audio applications have been designed with hard real-time re-
quirements. However, recent experiments on the Internet have shown that most of these
applications can be implemented to be rather tolerant of occasional delay-bound violations
and dropped packets. However, such applications still need a guaranteed bandwidth since
they generate data independently of the network conditions (like, for example, congestion
events). Thus, the performance degrades rapidly as soon as the allocated bandwidth be-
23