Data Performance in Burst Switching When the Voice Silence Periods Have a Hyperexponential Distribution

The performance of data in burst switching has been analyzed in previous work with a fluid approximation of the data traffic. This study extends the previous model to the case where the silence interval between talkspurts has a hyperexponential, rather than an exponential, distribution. It is shown that data performance is extremely sensitive to the variance of the silence interval, and that, for empirical talkspurt and silence distributions, this model provides a vast improvement on models which assume that both types of intervals are exponentially distributed.