The resources required to support transmission of a traffic source, such as video or multimedia, over a packet-switched network are heavily dependent on the burstiness of the traffic source. The present invention provides methods for accurately and rapidly determining burstiness curves for traffic sources, such as elementary video and MPEG-2 transport streams. The described deterministic computation methods provide space and time efficiency in relation to the level of accuracy selected. The methods teach the exploitation of the piecewise linearity within the burstiness curves such that computations are only performed at points subject to slope change. The efficiency of the described methods suggest wide applicability to a range of traffic characterization situations, including QoS provisioning as well as real-time applications, such as TV distribution.
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