Basic scenario

To explain late events, we need a system where the events arrive periodically and we want to know how many events are produced by unit of time. In Figure 6.1, we show this scenario:

Figure 6.1: The events as they were produced

In the preceding figure, each marble represents an event. They are not supposed to have dimensions as they are at a specific point in time. Events are punctual, but for demonstration purposes, we represent them as balls. As we can see in t1 and t2, two different events can happen at the same time.

In our figure, tn represents the n^th time unit. Each marble represents a single event. To differentiate between them, the events on t1 have one stripe, the events on t2 have two stripes, and the events on t3 have three stripes.

We want to count the events per unit of time, so we have the following:

• t1 has six events
• t2 has four events
• t3 has three...