Burst Ratios of Individual Flows

The burst ratio parameter is used to describe the tendency of packet losses to occur in series, one after another. Such series of losses can be especially badly tolerated by some multimedia applications. The main reason of high values of the burst ratio are overflowed output buffers at network nodes. So far, the burst ratio was studied for the aggregated traffic only, i.e. for all the packets traversing the router's output interface. In this paper, we study the burst ratio for every flow separately. We firstly compare the individual burst ratios with each other and with the burst ratio of the aggregated traffic, and identify conditions, under which they have the same values. Then we study the factors which may have an impact on the individual burst ratio, including the flow rate, variance of the interarrival time, packet service time distribution and buffer size.