The temperature and smoke components distributions inside a burning cigarette have been briefly reviewed. Then, focusing on our mathematical model to explain the natural smoldering mechanism of a cigarette and new mathematical models recently published by other authors, an approach to modeling a burning cigarette has been outlined. It has been more than forty years since modeling the burning process of a cigarette was first attempted. Although the modeling work, which has been adopted as a means to research the burning mechanism of a cigarette, has seen a certain degree of progress in the last forty years, almost all mathematical models published are restricted to a burning cigarette under a free convection or a steady draw condition. No realistic model has been published yet to explain the processes occurring inside a burning cigarette under an intermittent puffing cycle