Estimating degree of mixing in statistically multiplexed data

This paper examines the problem of determining the degree of mixing of two independent and different types of traffic streams from observations of their statistically multiplexed stream. A common example of a pair of such different stream types in networks would be one conforming to the conventional Poisson model and the other obeying long-range dependence characterized by a heavy-tailed distribution. We provide an expression for the probability density function of the inter-arrival time of the mixed stream in terms of those of the input streams for the general case. An approach is provided to estimate input parameters from the first and second order statistics of the output traffic for the specific case of multiplexing Poisson and heavy-tailed processes.