Inter-arrival times:
A) Requests arrive randomly, often separated by small time intervals with few long separations among them
B) The time until the next arrival is independent of when the last arrival occurred
C) Corollary:
- If you have different types of customers, each with its own exponential distribution, the resulting arrival for all the customers, irrespective of type, is also exponentially distributed.
- The number of arrivals in an interval is described by a Poisson distribution.