Performance of a Leaky Bucket System with Long-Range Dependent Input Traffic

The leaky bucket is a flow control mechanism that is designed to reduce the effect of the inevitable variability in the input stream into a node of a communication network. In this paper we study what happens when an input stream with heavy tailed work sessions arrives to a server protected by such a leaky bucket. Heavy tailed sessions produce long-range dependence in the input stream. Previous studies of the systems suggested that such long-range dependence can have dramatic effect on the system performance. By concentrating on the time until overflow of large finite buffers, we characterize the distribution of the time until buffer overflow, and we show that the leaky bucket flow control does make the system overflow less often, but long-range dependence still makes its presence felt.