A light weight traffic source for Web traffic simulation

The inclusion of transmission control protocol (TCP) is necessary for realistic simulations of data networks. However, the operation of HTTP-TCP sources puts a heavy tax on the simulations leading to two major seal ability problems; the resources required by each source put a limit on the total number of sources that can be simulated, and the number of events generated by every simulated connection leads to long simulation times. The scalability problems are major obstacles for realistic simulations of optical networks. In this paper we present a new type of traffic source that generates traffic statistically similar to the traffic produced by a number of HTTP-TCP sources. The source is based upon an integrated packet-session levels model that captures the Web user-behaviour as well as the TCP characteristics. To reduce the number of events we replace TCP's packet -feedback loop with a map-feedback loop. The simple solution eradicates the need for the acknowledgment-traffic flowing in the reverse direction of the data-traffic. To compare, we first generate aggregate traffic from realistic HTTP-TCP sources and then match the traffic generated by the light weight traffic source (LWTS). We show by comparing key traffic statistics that the source qualifies as a good candidate for generating network traffic.