U.S. Department of EnergyOffice of Scientific and Technical Information
Wide-area traffic: The failure of Poisson modeling
Abstract
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. The authors evaluate 21 wide-area traces, investigating a number of wide-area TCP arrival processes (session and connection arrivals, FTPDATA connection arrivals within FTP sessions, and TELNET packet arrivals) to determine the error introduced by modeling them using Poisson processes. The authors 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[DJCME92] interarrivals preserves burstiness over many time scales; and that FTPDATA connection arrivals within FTP sessions come bunched into ``connection bursts``, the largest of which are so large that they completely dominate FTPDATA traffic. Finally, they offer some preliminary results regarding how the findings relate to the possible self-similarity of wide-area traffic.
- Authors:
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Lawrence Berkeley Lab., CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- OSTI Identifier:
- 10107457
- Report Number(s):
- LBL-35238; CONF-9408202-2
ON: DE95004685;; TRN: AHC29507%%119
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC03-76SF00098
- Resource Type:
- Conference
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: SIGCOMM 1994 conference,London (United Kingdom),27 Aug - 4 Sep 1994; Other Information: PBD: Aug 1994
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE; COMPUTER NETWORKS; DATA TRANSMISSION; MATHEMATICAL MODELS; COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS; CORRELATIONS; RESEARCH PROGRAMS; 990200; MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTERS
Citation Formats
Paxson, V, and Floyd, S. Wide-area traffic: The failure of Poisson modeling. United States: N. p., 1994.
Web.
Paxson, V, & Floyd, S. Wide-area traffic: The failure of Poisson modeling. United States.
Paxson, V, and Floyd, S. 1994.
"Wide-area traffic: The failure of Poisson modeling". United States. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/10107457.
@article{osti_10107457,
title = {Wide-area traffic: The failure of Poisson modeling},
author = {Paxson, V and Floyd, S},
abstractNote = {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. The authors evaluate 21 wide-area traces, investigating a number of wide-area TCP arrival processes (session and connection arrivals, FTPDATA connection arrivals within FTP sessions, and TELNET packet arrivals) to determine the error introduced by modeling them using Poisson processes. The authors 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[DJCME92] interarrivals preserves burstiness over many time scales; and that FTPDATA connection arrivals within FTP sessions come bunched into ``connection bursts``, the largest of which are so large that they completely dominate FTPDATA traffic. Finally, they offer some preliminary results regarding how the findings relate to the possible self-similarity of wide-area traffic.},
doi = {},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10107457},
journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {Mon Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 1994},
month = {Mon Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 1994}
}