Peakedness measures for traffic characterization in high-speed networks

In high-speed networks based on asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), variable bit rate (VBR) sources generate bursty cell streams which share the link bandwidth wherever multiplexing occurs. In theory, the bandwidth requirement per stream to support a given quality-of-service at a multiplexer should generally decrease as the number of streams increases. In practice, high statistical multiplexing gain is difficult to achieve because good traffic characterizations are usually not available. This paper proposes the use of peakedness-based measures to capture the statistical information from traffic streams needed to determine bandwidth allocations. The standard definition of peakedness applies only to point process models of traffic. Yet fluid models of traffic have certain advantages in terms of tractability. Hence, we introduce a new measure called modified peakedness, which encompasses point process and fluid models under a common framework. We develop some of its properties and specialize it to several common traffic models. Finally, we study the effectiveness of the peakedness/modified peakedness as burstiness measures for real-time traffic.