[12537] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Routing without source information and Traffic self-similarity
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jerry Scharf)
Fri Sep 19 11:58:31 1997
To: Nathan Boyd <boydn@jacana.lcs.mit.edu>
cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 18 Sep 1997 13:02:06 EDT."
<199709181702.NAA04013@jacana.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 08:38:01 -0700
From: Jerry Scharf <scharf@bb.rc.vix.com>
boydn@jacana.lcs.mit.edu said:
> Second, to what degree do you believe Internet traffic exhibits
> self-similarity, and how does this change with varying levels of
> traffic aggregation? I have read papers from Bellcore and others
> suggesting that no matter the level of aggregation (be it a single
> Internet user or a major NAP), Internet traffic exhibits high degrees
> of self-similarity - but more recent research does not seem to agree
> with this.
I think the key here is aggregation and congestion control algorithms. In the
case of the Bellcore study, they were looking at high speed devices on LANs,
and possibly aggregation levels in the few thousand devices (not all active)
per line. The current OC3C pipes at the core of major networks are seeing
aggregations orders of magniture greater in terms of concurrent active
sessions (I remember hearing numbers approaching 10^6 over a year ago.) This
combined with many areas of congestion and the end-to-end nature of congestion
control makes any simple model, either statistical independence or self
similar, suspect.
just my opinion,
jerry
