On the Characteristics of Internet Traffic Variability: Spikes and Elephants

Tatsuya MORI  Ryoichi KAWAHARA  Shozo NAITO  Shigeki GOTO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E87-D   No.12   pp.2644-2653
Publication Date: 2004/12/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on New Technologies and their Applications of the Internet)
Category: Traffic Measurement and Analysis
Keyword: 
measurement,  analysis,  traffic,  spikes,  elephant flow,  

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Summary: 
Analysing and modeling of traffic play a vital role in designing and controlling of networks effectively. To construct a practical traffic model that can be used for various networks, it is necessary to characterize aggregated traffic and user traffic. This paper investigates these characteristics and their relationship. Our analyses are based on a huge number of packet traces from five different networks on the Internet. We found that: (1) marginal distributions of aggregated traffic fluctuations follow positively skewed (non-Gaussian) distributions, which leads to the existence of "spikes", where spikes correspond to an extremely large value of momentary throughput, (2) the amount of user traffic in a unit of time has a wide range of variability, and (3) flows within spikes are more likely to be "elephant flows", where an elephant flow is an IP flow with a high volume of traffic. These findings are useful in constructing a practical and realistic Internet traffic model.