A performance model and analysis of heterogeneous traffic with heavy tails

Abstract

Several research efforts have recently attempted to characterize the effects of heavy-tailed traffic on router performance, while the effects of light-tailed traffic have for long been understood. Since general Web traffic originates from heterogeneous sources, the study of traffic mixing is of importance as it can reveal the degree to which heavy-tailed traffic can be handled by networking infrastructure before router delay becomes unacceptable. We present a model for heterogeneous traffic sources, where each is an ON/OFF process with an exponential OFF time and an arbitrary ON-time distribution. We consider the case of a 2-source process where one has exponential ON time and the other power tailed and present some analysis results showing the significance of traffic mixing on router performance.