Abstract
Recent research has shown the presence of self-similarity in TCP traffic which is unaffected by the application level and human factors. This suggests the presence of protocol level contributions to network traffic self-similarity, at least in certain time scales where the effect of protocol behavior is most prominent. In this paper we show how TCP’s retransmission and congestion control mechanism contributes to the selfsimilarity of aggregate TCP flows. We develop a mathematical formulation which shows that TCP’s retransmission and congestion control mechanism results in packet dynamics of a TCP flow being analogous to a number of ON/OFF sources with OFF periods taken from a heavy tailed distribution. Using well known limit theorems, we then show that this contributes to the self-similar nature of TCP traffic. Our model shows a direct correlation of the loss rates to the degree of self-similarity. Measurements on traces collected by us also exhibit this relationship predicted by our model.
Supported in part by DARPA contract F30602-00-2-0537 and in part by DoD MURI contract F49620-97-1-0382.
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Sikdar, B., Vastola, K.S. (2001). On the Contribution of TCP to the Self-Similarity of Network Traffic. In: Palazzo, S. (eds) Evolutionary Trends of the Internet. IWDC 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2170. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45400-4_38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45400-4_38
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