Mobile Netw Appl (2007) 12:31–41 DOI 10.1007/s11036-006-0004-y Queue Analysis and Multiplexing of Heavy-tailed Traffic in Wireless Packet Data Networks Shahram Teymori · Weihua Zhuang Published online: 14 December 2006 © Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006 Abstract Recent research based on traffic measure- ments shows that Internet traffic flows have a fractal nature (i.e., self-similarity property), which causes an underestimation of network engineering parameters when using the conventional Poisson model. Prelimi- nary field measurements demonstrate that packet data traffic in wireless communications also exhibits self- similarity. In this paper, we investigate the queuing behavior of self-similar traffic flows for data applica- tions in a packet-switching single-server wireless net- work. The traffic is generated by an on–off source with heavy-tailed on periods and exponentially distributed off periods. We extend previous analysis of a relation among the asymptotic distribution of loss probability, traffic specifications, and transmission rate for a wire- line system to a wireless system, taking into account wireless propagation channel characteristics. We also investigate the multiplexing of heavy-tailed traffic flows with a finite buffer for the downlink transmission of a wireless network. Computer simulation results demon- strate that assumptions made in the theoretical analy- S. Teymori (B ) Automation Systems Division, ATS Automation Tooling Systems Inc., 250 Royal Oak Rd., Cambridge, Ontario, Canada N3H 4R6 e-mail: steymori@atsautomation.com W. Zhuang Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1 W. Zhuang e-mail: wzhuang@uwaterloo.ca sis are reasonable and the derived relationships are accurate. Keywords delay · heavy-tailed traffic · loss probability · quality-of-service (QoS) · queueing analysis · resource allocation · self-similarity · statistical multiplexing · wireless packet transmission 1 Introduction Wireless communication systems have been revolution- ized by technological advances in the last decade. The third generation (and beyond) wireless networks use and will continue to use packet-switching technologies to provide high-speed data services such as File Trans- portation Protocol (FTP) and web browsing. These applications have stringent performance requirements in terms of throughput and transmission accuracy. Data traffic flows can tolerate a certain degree of transmis- sion delay, depending on the application; however, they are sensitive to transmission errors and can normally tolerate a bit error rate (BER) up to 10 −6 . Selection of a proper model to analyze the queueing behaviors of network traffic flows plays an important role in network engineering. Recently, it has been shown that the conventional Poisson traffic model is not proper for packet data traffic in the Internet [1]. It is also observed that the aggregated Internet traffic flows have similar patterns in different time scales, referred to as self- similarity [2]. Similarly, the existence of self-similarity in wireless network traffic flows has been observed [3] and has attracted attention in the research commu- nity [4]. The self-similarity characteristics result in that