The traffic generated by an application also depends of the object retrieval schedule adapted by the application -- which determines the time instants at which the application should receive such data. The design of the multimedia architecture and hardware. In particular, the design of buffers to provide a smooth delivery of data to the system is of prime importance,
For Multimedia purposes (and others), a buffer can viewed as spatial representation of time. In general, the flow of information is from a server to a client. In any application there is always a preset movement of media streams during its execution. Analysis the application will yield windows in the application where further data may be streamed. The actual buffer size (at the client) is always finite and will therefore impose a practical limit. Also the bandwidth of the channel between the client and the server has an impact. However, noting that the number of bits in transit can always equal this limit means that planning the streaming of data is possible. Buffer management strategies have to balance the above constraints. Buffer management strategies have been developed that are adaptive or dynamic - take into account current system parameters as application is running - or can fixed and predetermined beforehand.
The reader is referred the Chapter 8 of Networked Multimedia Systems by Raghavan and Tripathi for full details of these type of analyses.