Performance impacts of multi-scaling in wide area TCP/IP traffic

Abstract
Recent measurement and simulation studies have re- vealed that wide area network traffic has complex statistica l—possibly multifractal—characteristics on short timescales, and is self-similar on long timescales. In this paper, using measured TCP traces and queue- ing simulations, we show that the fine timescale features can affect per- formance substantially at low and intermediate utilizations, while the coarse timescale self-similarity is important at intermediate and high utilizations. We outline an analytical method for estimating perfor- mance for traffic that is self-similar on coarse timescales a nd multi- fractal on fine timescales, and show that the engineering pro blem of setting safe operating points for planning or admission controls can be significantly affected by fine timescale fluctuations in netw ork traffic.

This publication has 11 references indexed in Scilit: