The role of the Weibull distribution in Internet traffic modeling

Abstract

This paper highlights the important role played by the two parameter Weibull distribution in Internet traffic modeling. Internet traffic structurally consists of sessions, flows and packets; and traverses through different tiers of service providers during its end-to-end journey. Observation of invariant heavy tails in access traffic patterns of individual users has motivated us to investigate traffic transformation/aggregation as it traverses from access to core network. We found that the flexible nature of the Weibull distribution can capture this transformation at inter-arrival level. We also present and justify our hypothesis that given a suitable scale parameter specific to a certain access media or tier, the Weibull shape parameter can be used to zoom in from session to flow and to the packet level inter-arrivals.