Multiplexing Traffic at the Entrance to Wide-Area Networks

Many application-level traffic streams, or conversations, are multiplexed at the points where local-area networks meet the wide-area portion of an internetwork. Multiplexing policies and mechanisms acting at these points should provide good performance to each conversation, allocate network resources fairly among conversations, and make efficient use of network resources. In order to characterize wide-area network traffic, we have analyzed traces from four Internet sites. We identify characteristics common to all conversations of each major type of traffic, and find that these characteristics are stable across time and geographic site. Our results contradict many prevalent beliefs. For example, previous simulation models of wide-area traffic have assumed bulk transfers ranging from 80 Kilobytes to 2 Megabytes of data. In contrast, we find that up to 90% of all bulk transfers involve 10 Kilobytes or less. This and other findings may affect results of previous studies and should be taken..