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

Abstract : 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.