On the role of flows and sessions in Internet traffic modeling: an explorative toy-model

Fabio Ricciato (1, 2) , Angelo Coluccia (2) , Alessandro d'Alconzo (1) , Darryl Veitch (3) , Pierre Borgnat (4) , Patrice Abry (4)

1 FTW - Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien [Autriche]
2 Università del Salento - Università del Salento
3 CUBIN - CUBIN (ARC Centre for UltraBroadband Information Networks)
4 Phys-ENS - Laboratoire de Physique de l'ENS Lyon

In this work we present a simple toy-model that is able to explain certain empirical observations reported in a set of previous papers by Hohn et al. [1]–[3] about the wavelet spectrum of real traffic traces. Therein, the authors found that the wavelet spectrum is substantially invariant to flow scrambling and truncation, suggesting that super-flow structures above the transport layer — i.e., sessions — can be ignored for modeling the packet arrival process. Based on the proposed toy-model, we offer an interpretation framework that goes in the opposite direction, wherein sessions, not transport-layer flows, should be taken as the main structural entities in simplified on/off models.

Mots clés: Internet Traffic Model; Flows; Sessions; Wavelet Analysis; LD plots

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Fabio Ricciato, Angelo Coluccia, Alessandro d'Alconzo, Darryl Veitch, Pierre Borgnat, et al.. On the role of flows and sessions in Internet traffic modeling: an explorative toy-model. IEEE GLOBECOM 2009, IEEE, Nov 2009, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States. ⟨ensl-00476002⟩