A Comparative Study of TCP/IP Traffic Behavior in Broadband Access Networks ?

In recent years, broadband access has become the norm in the Internet world. As of now, not much has been said about the behavior of traffic on these access networks. Also, the common assumption has been that the traffic behavior on one broadband access network is not very different from another. In this paper, we present an analysis of TCP/IP traffic data that has been collected from two broadband access networks: Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and Broadband Fixed Wireless (BFW). We investigate the TCP session behavior in terms of duration and number of bytes transferred for both access schemes, including that of several dominating applications, namely, kazaa, gnutella (peer-to-peer (P2P) applications) and http. We also investigate the TCP connection interarrival time process in the two access schemes. We observe that although the TCP session behavior is similar in both access networks, the behavior of the connection interarrival time process in BFW is influenced by the underlying MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol.