Some characteristics of bursty packet loss in M/G/1/K queues

A useful measure for characterizing the degree of bursty loss is studied. The growth of the Internet technology enables us to use network applications for streaming audio and video. In such applications, bursty loss of packets has much effect on the quality of service (QoS) in these applications. Actually, whether a packet is successfully received or lost depends heavily on the result of the transmission of the previous packet. That is, if a packet is lost, then the network may be in congestion and the following packets tend to be lost consecutively.We deal with an M/G/1/K queueing system and analytically derived the probability of the burst length where the meaning of burst length is the number of consecutively lost packets in a loss burst. We examine two cases of service time distributions: Light-tailed (exponential) and heavy-tailed (Pareto) service time distributions. Our results show that the burst length is heavy-tailed when the service time is heavy-tailed. We also show other characteristics of the bursty packet loss.