Definition of burstiness and quantization for delay sensitive traffic streams

We present a definition of burstiness for delay sensitive traffic streams in terms of a function, i.e., the cell loss probability of a bufferless multiplexer at all non-negative link capacities. Some properties of the definition are proved. One property implies any definition of burstiness in terms of a real number may not be appropriate. The other property implies the commonly used moment matching method in approximating traffic sources may not be appropriate either. We also present a quantization algorithm for networks which provide only finitely many bit rates for describing traffic characteristics. Our proposed quantization algorithm guarantees the quantized version is always burstier than the original source and thus can be used to design call admission control scheme for an ATM network.