9415684 Cruz The goal of this project is to develop new methods to efficiently predict and control the quality of service seen by heterogeneous users in an integrated services network. This is critical to the development of efficient and economically viable large scale high speed networks. Statistical sharing can be used to gain efficiency, but it introduces uncertainties in the quality of service seen by users of a network. Since the uncertainty that arises with statistical sharing is primarily due to queueing phenomena, this will be our main focus. Thus, one may view our project as a study on the behavior and control of queueing networks. Viewed in this larger context, our work will have an impact in other vitally important research areas, such as flexible manufacturing networks and transportation networks. We will, however, be primarily motivated by issues which arise in a communication context. We will develop techniques for examining end-to-end performance issues, and examine mechanisms for the allocation and scheduling of resources. One emphasis will be on uncovering mathematical structure of sample paths. This will have an impact on the utility of performance analyses involving both stochastic and non-stochastic models. The issues being examined are critical to the design of economical large scale high speed networks. ***
