Capacity Bounds on Timing Channels with Bounded Service Times

Abstract

It is well known that queues with exponentially distributed service times have the smallest Shannon capacity among all single-server queues with the same service rate. In this paper, we study the capacity of timing channels in which the service time distributions have bounded support, i.e., Bounded Service Timing Channels (BSTC). We derive an upper bound and two lower bounds on the capacity of such timing channels. The tightness of these bounds is investigated analytically as well as via simulations. We find that the uniform BSTC serves a role for BSTCs that is similar to what the exponential service timing channel does for the case of timing channels with unbounded service time distributions. That is, when the length of the support interval is small, the uniform BSTC has the smallest capacity among all BSTCs.