The impact of buffer and bandwidth on the scaling behavior of network traffic

The effect of network mechanisms (i.e. buffer, bandwidth, statistical multiplexing and traffic control protocols) on traffic is on two aspects: first they contribute to network performance by limiting the timescale range of interest for performance analysis; second they shape the traffic, i.e. changing the scaling behavior of traffic. While some research has been done on the first aspect in terms of critical timescale, the second aspect has not be given enough attention. This paper investigates the effect of buffer and bandwidth on the scaling behavior of traffic. Our analysis shows that they have different effect on traffic at small timescale and large timescale. Both buffer and bandwidth can significantly affect the small timescale scaling exponent, but they seem ineffective on the large timescale scaling exponent. Moreover the use of smaller buffer size and less bandwidth will reduce the energy of traffic at small timescale. Therefore traffic may become less bursty.