On the capabilities of on-off models to capture arbitrary ATM sources

B-ISDN is conceived to support all types of existing and new emerging applications. In the context of B-ISDN and the new age of information, the user terminal will generate data, voice, video and, in general, multimedia traffic. ATM is the selected mechanism for the efficient transfer of these information across the future worldwide network. The proper design of this network requires cost-effective solutions that may satisfy the quality of service constraints of all the connections. To achieve this goal, an accurate characterization of the traffic generated by the sources is needed. This characterization should capture the statistical properties of the ATM traffic that are relevant to network performance. A review of literature shows that, from a general point of view, this objective has been reached, but with two drawbacks: traffic models are application dependant and, moreover, for some applications, traffic models are not analytically tractable. The final objective of this paper is to construct a general analytical B-ISDN model. Particularly, the paper focuses on the on-off models with general distributions, for which a complete exact statistical characterization at cell level was already obtained in a previous paper. On the basis of this characterization, an algorithm devoted to capture the statistical behaviour of any source is formulated and developed. Particularly, the algorithm captures the average rate and burstiness of any source in an exact way, and the autocorrelation function in an optimal way. Finally, numerical results for different types of video sources are provided