Characteristics of Low--bandwidth Conversations

Wide area wireless networks will have limited bandwidth. Effective analysis and modeling of these systems requires information that is not appropriately represented by previous high bandwidth traffic studies. This paper describes a data collection effort for gathering low--bandwidth traffic statistics. The connections monitored have similar bandwidth constraints as projected wireless systems. Gross session statistics, which have no counterpart in previous studies, are presented. Application level protocol statistics are also presented and compared to previous high speed studies. Protocol usage distributions are provided to identify potential optimization areas. 1 Introduction A thorough understanding of low--bandwidth traffic characteristics is necessary for effective management of low speed links. Previous wide-area traffic studies gathered data from high speed LANs and network backbones. However, future wireless networks will make use of physical connections having orders of magnitu..