A conformance measure for traffic shaping in high-speed networks with an application to the leaky bucket

One purpose of a traffic shaping mechanism (such as the leaky bucket) is to smooth out an input process into an output process. In so doing, a question of interest is the following: to what extent has the input process been modified, or, to what extent does the output process conform to the input process? To this end, the authors define and characterize a conformance measure. They apply this idea to a leaky bucket in a high-speed network in which this issue may arise naturally. They show how to find the conformance measure for a leaky bucket with the Markovian arrival process