Source traffic description proposed by the ATM Forum is intended to simplify the specification of the intrinsic traffic characteristics at the UNI level. However, from the point of view of the internal traffic management, this description can be inadequate, since it ignores important factors such as burstiness and correlation. In this paper, we make this fact clear in an analytical way by considering on-off processes with arbitrary distributions. For these processes, we provide exact

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... expressions such as the squared coefficient of variation (a measure of burstiness) and the autocorrelation of the successive inter-arrival times. Keywords User Network Interface (UNI) T. Hasegawa et al. (eds.), Local and Metropolitan Communication Systems