Time Dependent Lévy Flights Models for Internet Trafc

Measurements of local and wide-area network trafc in the 90's established the relation between burstiness and self-similarity of network trafc. Several papers demonstrated that the widely used Poisson based models could not be applied for the past decade's network trafc. Recent papers have questioned the direct applicability of these results in networks of the new century. Some authors of these papers demand the revision of previous assumptions on the Poisson trafc models. They argue that as newer and newer network technologies are implemented and the amount of Internet trafc grows exponentially, the burstiness of network trafc might cancel out due to the huge number of aggregated trafc ows. Some results are based on analyses of high-speed Internet backbone links and other trafc traces. We analyzed the same trafc traces and applied novel methods to characterize them in terms of packet interarrival time. We demonstrate that the series of interarrival times in the 2003 traces is still close to a self-similar process. Since then, new trafc traces have been made public, including ones captured from OC-192 links of the Internet backbone in 2008. We also compare the 2008 trafc traces with the ones captured in 2003 and apply our analytical methods to illustrate the tendency of Internet trafc burstiness in recent years. We found that the burstiness of the interarrival times decreased signicantly compared to earlier traces. Index TermsInternet trafc; burstiness; Lévy Flights. 1