On the multi-scale behavior of packet size distribution in Internet backbone network

Abstract

It is critical to adapt clear and representative real world traffic properties as groundwork for the contemporary and emergent future Internet workload generation. Byte count process and packet count process have been regarded as two prominent manifestations of the underlying characteristics of the network traffic. The long-range dependent property of these processes is already widely known. However, inter-relationship between the two processes remains to be discovered. The objective of this work is to investigate packet size aspects of network traffic that are yet to be discovered. This paper introduces bandwidth frequency distribution as an approach to analyze the traffic. It first focuses on Hurst parameter as a means to assess self-similarity. Then, it introduces bandwidth frequency histogram and analyzes the distribution. As a result of analyzing the bandwidth frequency histogram, the observed bandwidth frequency distribution is decided by aggregation of the bandwidth behavior of five packet size distributions. It is found that packet interval distribution is well fitted with Gaussian distribution.