There are characterization techniques that stochastically represent bursty network and/or I/O traffic. Here is an example.

Daniel P Heyman and David Lucantoni. Modeling multiple ip traffic streams with rate limits. Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on, 11(6):948–958, 2003.

Are there applications that generate I/O requests in bursts and the request arrival rates (burstiness) are difficult to be stochastically characterized (for example, hard to be precise)? If yes, what are the applications? If possible, please point me to publications. Thank you.