Traffic characterization for an interconnection service of fast Ethernet LANs

The work focuses on traffic characterization of the LAN-to-LAN interconnection service, which represents the first move toward broadband internetworking. The paper first describes the activities related to measurement sessions carried out over a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet link of the company intranet of CSELT (Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni), then it reports the analysis of the acquired data necessary to evaluate the statistical parameters to be used in the modeling process. Measurements cover a time period of about one month, and we propose a method to gain confidence about the significance of the statistical parameters computed from the collected traffic traces, in order to reduce the risk that the extracted statistical features depend on a particular measurement session. The last part of the work reports some simulation studies, aiming to infer the statistical features that have a major impact on queueing performance.