The Token Bucket Allocation and Reallocation Problems ( MPRASE Token Bucket )

This paper deals with the dimensioning of token buckets. Two related problems are formulated and solved. The first is the token bucket allocation problem (TBAP) which is finding the cost-minimal token bucket for the transmission of a given VBR traffic stream, e.g. an MPEG movie, from the user's point of view. This problem has been treated in literature before but as we will show not completely. We will derive and efficient and exact algorithm for this problem. As a second step, the token bucket reallocation problem (TBRP) is investigated based on the results for the TBAP. The dynamic token bucket dimensioning problem consists of finding the cost-minimal series of token buckets for the transmission of the stream. For this problem an exact algorithm is again presented and furthermore, several heuristics are devised. The best heuristic comes closer than 0.25% to the results of the exact algorithm and is orders of magnitudes faster as several numerical simulations show. We also try a mulitregression analysis for token bucket dimension-ing. This paper fits into the MPRASE (Multi-Period Resource Allocation at System Edges) framework, the treated problems are single-customer, single-provider problems with a two-dimensional resource model (the token bucket), a linear cost model, and a deterministic edge.