Pay-Burst-Only-Once in Real-Time Calculus

Real-Time Calculus (RTC) is a powerful framework for modeling and analyzing complex networked real-time systems. RTC builds up on and shares many similarities with Network Calculus (NC), but some concepts are not completely the same in RTC and NC. One of the most important properties in NC is pay-burst-only-once, which can improve the precision of end-to-end performance analysis. Naturally, people would expect the pay-burst-only-once property to also hold in RTC. In fact, some existing work has used it in some performance analysis problems. Unfortunately, the pay-burst-only-once property has never been proved in RTC. There are even some results seeming to be against the pay-burst-only-once property in RTC. In this paper, we prove that the pay-burst-only-once property indeed holds in RTC.