A tradeoff between increased network speed and reduced effective bandwidths

We present a new perspective on effective bandwidths which allows us to squeeze the most from a network while still meeting QoS constraints. We show that if buffer space requirements are also considered, the effective bandwidth of a given stream can be considerably reduced. This reduction in capacity is shown to have little or no impact on the ability of the network to meet the QoS constraints of the stream. We also show that even with a fixed buffer threshold, Gaussian traffic streams can provide a multiplexing gain not predicted by traditional effective bandwidths.