Small-time scaling behaviors of Internet backbone traffic: An empirical study

Show full item record

Title: Small-time scaling behaviors of Internet backbone traffic: An empirical study
Author: Zhang, Zhi-Li; Ribeiro, Vinay Joseph; Moon, Sue; Diot, Christophe
Type: Conference Paper
Keywords: networks; Internet; scaling; long-range-dependence; self-similarity; backbone; traffic
Center: Center for Multimedia Communications; Digital Signal Processing
Abstract: We study the small-time (sub-seconds) scaling behaviors of Internet backbone traffic, based on traces collected from OC3/12/48 links in a tier-1 ISP. We observe that for a majority of these traces, the (second-order) scaling exponents at small time scales (1ms - 100ms) are fairly close to 0.5, indicating that <i>traffic fluctuations</i> at these time scales are (nearly) uncorrelated. In addition, the traces manifest mostly <i>monofractal</i> behaviors at small time scales. The objective of the paper is to understand the potential causes or factors that influence the small-time scalings of Internet backbone traffic via empirical data analysis. We analyze the traffic composition of the traces along two dimensions â flow size and flow <i>density</i>. Our study uncovers <i>dense</i> flows (i.e., flows with bursts of densely clustered packets) as the correlation-causing factor in small time scales, and reveals that the traffic composition in terms of proportions of <i>dense vs. sparse</i> flows plays a major role in influecing the small-time scalings of aggregate traffic.
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1911/20458
Date Published: 2003-04-20

Files in this item

Files Size Format View
Zha2003Apr5Small-tim.PDF 998.4Kb application/pdf View/Open
Need help?

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

  • DSP Publications
    Publications by Rice Faculty and graduate students in digital signal processing.
  • ECE Publications
    Publications by Rice University Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty and graduate students

Show full item record

Browse

My Account