How Does an ATM Switch See the Traffic Through the Leaky Bucket

This paper describes a new way of ATM traffic characterisation based on measurement. The method, called Leaky Bucket Analysis can be directly used for quantitative analysis of burst structure, determination of adequate shaping rate, selection of sustainable parameter set, retrieving input parameters for source modelling, analysis of multiplexing performance and dimensioning ATM networks. The proposed method is based on the leaky bucket algorithm which is widely used in ATM context. The goal of our characterisation method is to reveal the important properties of the traffic just as the switch sees them.