Home // International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, volume 2, number 1, 2009 // View article

Time Dependent Lévy Flights Models for Internet Traffic

Authors:
György Terdik
Tibor Gyires

Keywords: Internet traffic; burstiness; Lévy Flights.

Abstract:
Measurements of local and wide-area network traffic in the 90’s established the relation between burstiness and self-similarity of network traffic. Several papers demonstrated that the widely used Poisson based models could not be applied for the past decade’s network traffic. Recent papers have questioned the direct applicability of these results in networks of the new century. Some authors of these papers demand the revision of previous assumptions on the Poisson traffic models. They argue that as newer and newer network technologies are implemented and the amount of Internet traffic grows exponentially, the burstiness of network traffic might cancel out due to the huge number of aggregated traffic flows. Some results are based on analyses of high-speed Internet backbone links and other traffic traces. We analyzed the same traffic traces and applied novel methods to characterize them in terms of packet interarrival time. We demonstrate that the series of interarrival times in the 2003 traces is still close to a self-similar process. Since then, new traffic traces have been made public, including ones captured from OC-192 links of the Internet backbone in 2008. We also compare the 2008 traffic traces with the ones captured in 2003 and apply our analytical methods to illustrate the tendency of Internet traffic burstiness in recent years. We found that the burstiness of the interarrival times decreased significantly compared to earlier traces.

Pages: 100 to 109

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 7, 2009

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644