Variational Bounds and Sensitivity Analysis of Traffic Processes in Continuous Flow Models

This paper is concerned with functional variations in processes associatedwith Continuous Flow Models (CFMs). The considered CFMs are character-ized (defined) by their inflow-rate process, service-rate process, and buffer size,and have associated with them various derived processes such as the workload(buffer contents), outflow and overflow processes. The paper’s main result iscomprised of Lipchitz continuity of the mappings between the defining processesand the derived processes. This result is extended from single-flow CFMs tomulti-flow CFMs, where it is used to establish the unbiasedness of IPA forworkload-related and loss-related performance functions.