Design of a burstiness measure for variable bit rate video

Some of the problems with existing burstiness measures are addressed, and a new burstiness measure for VBR video has been developed. It is shown that the burstiness measure has many desirable properties to specify not only the statistical characteristics, but also the temporal variations of traffic. The new burstiness measure is called the mean overload ratio (MOR) because it represents the degree of traffic overload during burst periods. To investigate the feasibility of this burstiness measure, the properties of MOR are discussed, and a positive relationship of the value of MOR with the cell loss rate is presented. The MOR measure has been applied to on-off source streams for the purpose of comparing the effectiveness of MOR with other burstiness measures. Our findings show that MOR is more appropriate for specifying the burstiness of traffic than the others. It is also the case that this measure can be applied to other types of bursty sources in ATM networks.