Jean-Yves Le Boudec Knihy

Network Calculus is a set of recent developments that provide deep insights into flow problems encountered in the Internet and in intranets. The first part of the book is a self-contained, introductory course on network calculus. It presents the core of network calculus, and shows how it can be applied to the Internet to obtain results that have physical interpretations of practical importance to network engineers. The second part serves as a mathematical reference used across the book. It presents the results from Min-plus algebra needed for network calculus. The third part contains more advanced material. It is appropriate reading for a graduate course and a source of reference for professionals in networking by surveying the state of the art of research and pointing to open problems in network calculus and its application in different fields, such as mulitmedia smoothing, aggegate scheduling, adaptive guarantees in Internet differential services, renegotiated reserved services, etc.

Performance evaluation is a critical stage of software- and hardware-system development that every computer engineer and scientist should master. Although complex Рrequiring skills in mathematics, measurement techniques and simulation Рperformance evaluation is primarily an art; indeed, the most difficult stage in a performance analysis is defining the approach: once you know what to do, it is less difficult to define a plan of attack with your familiar software tools. We present a set of topics, which we believe should be part of every engineer's intellectual toolkit. This includes the statistical exploitation of numerical results in an efficient and ethical way, for example: how to summarize variability or fairness; what transient removal in a simulation is; and how to make predictions from a time series. We also present well-known performance patterns, which helps to quickly bring the engineer to the main issues. For queuing theory, we focus on a subset of very useful results, such as operational laws. A highlight of the book is the development of Palm calculus, also called “the importance of the viewpoint,” which is central to queuing theory. Indeed, this topic has so many applications to simulation and to system analysis in general that it is a very good time investment. This book began as a set of lecture notes for a course given at EPFL.