Characteristics of IP traffic in commercial wide area networks

Measurements from an Internet backbone link carrying TCP traffic towards different ADSL areas are analyzed in this paper. For traffic analysis, we adopt a flow-based approach and the popular mice/elephants dichotomy. The originality of the experimental data reported in this paper, when compared with previous measurements from very high speed backbone links, is in that commercial traffic comprises a significant percentage due to peer-to-peer applications. This kind of traffic exhibits some remarkable properties in terms of mice, elephants and bit rates, which are thoroughly described in this paper. Mice due to p2p protocols and mice due to classical Internet applications such as HTTP, ftp, etc. are analyzed separately. It turns out that by adopting a suitable level of aggregation, global traffic can be described by means of usual tele-traffic models based on M/G/∞ queues with Weibul-lian service times. The global bit rate can be approximated by the superposition of Gaussian processes perturbed by a white noise and does not exhibit long range dependence