In peak rate allocation, the maximum rate for every source is allocated at every switch. Losing a number of cells of a burst may result in the loss of the information content of the whole burst. Therefore , an ATM network should support VCs requesting QoS guarantees with respect to the burst loss probability. An ATM network should also support efficiently VCs requiring performance guarantees at the cell level. The running time specification described in this paper requires knowledge of the state of all sources in order to specify the instantaneous cumulative rate of the sources.
Every cell is marked as the start, middle or end cell of the burst.