Self-Similar Property for TCP Traffic under the Bottleneck Restrainment

Abstract

The scale-invariant burstiness or self-similarity has been found in real network and has been subject to the file size of Web servers or the duration of user sessions. In addition, self-similar burstiness has been characterized by the transport layer protocol. Traffic dynamics, however, are mainly generated by physical conditions such as the resource restrainment. In this paper, we have investigated self-similar property for TCP traffic under the resource restrainment to make the network parameter vary using the network simulator. After analyzing the simulated results, following properties were extracted. Firstly, self-similar traffic rather than exponential traffic generates the performance gain especially in the throughput, while the bottleneck bandwidth restrainment under the condition at exceeding 4% packet loss rate eliminates the performance gain. Secondly, on the saturated condition with nearly no packet loss caused by the increase of client number, the self-similar property is sustained with the Hurst parameter with the value of 0.5 for all alpha's. Finally, large link delay exceeding 700 msec emphasizes the self-similar property for all alpha's enlarging the Hurst parameter approximately at the value of 0.8.