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 informations accross 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 analitically tractable. The final objective of this paper..