Communication performance models enable networked multimedia applicati
ons to describe their performance requirements as regards throughput,
delay, jitter, and loss behaviour of a particular communication servic
e. This paper presents four recently proposed models and demonstrates
their usability with a video-on-demand example. The selected models ar
e two models designed by the Tenet Group, one model on which ATM chann
el traffic is characterized by the ATM Forum, and one model published
as RFC1363 by the Internet community. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.