Burstiness characterization of ATM cell streams

Abstract

In this paper we deal with a traffic characterization that can be applied to ATM environments. A characterization suitable to describe the sources and the multiplexed traffic required to evaluate the influence of traffic on the behavior of ATM devices.

Burstiness is one of the most significant aspects of traffic that the future IBCN/ATM will have to deal with. Burstiness may be associated to the degree of variation in the cell-rate, but the problem is to define and quantify it. Most of the simple definitions used in the literature are not complete enough.

Here, we focus on ATM-traffic burstiness characterization. The major contribution is to characterize traffic in ATM networks by looking at the statistics of random burst sequences instead of random cell streams. The most commonly used definitions for burstiness are reformulated and a proposal for better burst measurements is made. The burst measurements have been tested using different pseudo-random cell sequences.