A model for representing wide area Internet packet behavior

In this paper an Internet cloud model is presented with the objective of representing Internet packet delay, loss, and out-of-sequence behavior in the wide area network. The main requirements of this model are to capture burstiness and long range dependence in packet delays burstiness of loss periods, and the correlation between network delay, packet loss ratio, and fraction of our-of-sequence packet deliveries. In representing these properties, the underlying assumption is that the dominant component of network traffic in determining delay, loss, and out-of-sequence delivery is FTP and Web traffic with a heavy-tailed file size distribution such as Pareto. Accordingly, in this paper the packet flow in the wide area Internet is modeled as a concatenation of U/Pareto/1 queues. The expected value of the end-to-end delay is obtained simply by an M/G/1 queueing analysis. The long range dependence in packet delays and is illustrated by analyzing the delay traces obtained by simulation.