( A 4 , P , S ) - An Efficient Background Traffic Model for Wide - Area Network Simulation

This paper presents a background trafic model, ( M , P , S ) , designed for use in wide-area packet-switched network simulators. The approach is to model the aggregate trafSlc generated by a large campus network and then partition the aggregate trafic into substreams, one for each campus-level destination in the backbone network. We use packet traces collected at the network exchange point of a large campus network and the global Internet to motivate our model design and demonstrate that our approach generates realistic results. Key features of the proposed model include: ( 1 ) efficiency the generation of only a single long-range dependent stream is required for each campus network, (2 ) simplicity the statistical properties (i.e., arrival density and correlation structure) of the sample path are controlled by u f e w parameters, and (3 ) accuracy the self-similarity and arrival distribution for both the aggregate trafic and its component substreams accurately reproduce those of the empirical trafJic trace. The results presented in this paper can be used to develop WAN background load models and trafic generators, contribute to understanding the fractal behavior of Internet backbone network utilization, and provide a benchmark to evaluate the accuracy of existing trafic models.