The leaky bucket is a flow control mechanism that is designed to reduce the effect of the inevitable variability in the input stream into a node of a communication network. In this paper we study what happens when an input stream with heavy-tailed work sessions arrives to a server protected by such a leaky bucket. Heavy-tailed sessions produce long-range dependence in the input stream. Previous studies of single server fluid queues without flow control suggested that such long-range dependence can have a dramatic effect on the system performance. By concentrating on the expected time till overflow of a large finite buffer we show that leaky-bucket flow control does make the system overflow less often, but long-range dependence still makes its presence felt.
