Wide area traffic: the failure of Poisson modeling
Paxson, V.; Floyd, S.
Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on
Volume 3, Issue 3, Jun 1995 Page(s):226 - 244
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/90.392383
Summary:Network arrivals are often modeled as Poisson processes for
analytic simplicity, even though a number of traffic studies have shown
that packet interarrivals are not exponentially distributed. We evaluate
24 wide area traces, investigating a number of wide area TCP arrival
processes (session and connection arrivals, FTP data connection arrivals
within FTP sessions, and TELNET packet arrivals) to determine the error
introduced by modeling them using Poisson processes. We find that
user-initiated TCP session arrivals, such as remote-login and
file-transfer, are well-modeled as Poisson processes with fixed hourly
rates, but that other connection arrivals deviate considerably from
Poisson; that modeling TELNET packet interarrivals as exponential
grievously underestimates the burstiness of TELNET traffic, but using
the empirical Tcplib interarrivals preserves burstiness over many time
scales; and that FTP data connection arrivals within FTP sessions come
bunched into “connection bursts”, the largest of which are
so large that they completely dominate FTP data traffic. Finally, we
offer some results regarding how our findings relate to the possible
self-similarity of wide area traffic
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