摘要： This paper develops a notion of capacity–delay–error (CDE) boundaries as a performance model of networked sources and systems. The goal is to provision effective capacities that sustain certain statistical delay guarantees with a small probability of error. We use a stochastic non-equilibrium approach that models the variability of traffic and service to formalize the influence of delay constraints on the effective capacity. Permitting unbounded delays, known ergodic capacity results from information theory are recovered in the limit. We prove that the model has the property of additivity, which enables composing CDE boundaries obtained for sources and systems as if in isolation. A method for construction of CDE boundaries is devised based on moment-generating functions, which includes the large body of results from the theory of effective bandwidths. Solutions for essential sources, channels, and respective coders are derived, including Huffman coding, MPEG video, Rayleigh fading, and hybrid automatic repeat request. Results for tandem channels and for the composition of sources and channels are shown.