A flow-based approach to modeling ADSL traffic on an IP backbone link

Measurements from an Internet backbone link carrying TCP traffic towards different ADSL areas are analyzed in this paper For traffic analysis, we adopt a flow-based approach and the popular mice/elephants dichotomy. The originality of the experimental data reported in this paper when compared with previous measurements from very high speed backbone links, is that commercial traffic comprises a significant part due to peer-to-peer applications. This kind of traffic exhibits some remarkable properties in terms of mice, elephants and bit rates, which are thoroughly described in this paper Global traffic is actually decomposed into several flow components on the basis of the mice/elephants dichotomy. Mice due p2p protocols and mice due to classical Internet applications such as HTTP, ftp, etc. are analyzed separately. It turns out that by adopting a suitable level of aggregation, global traffic can be described by means of usual tele-traffic models based on M/G/infinity queues with Weibullian service times. The global bit rate can then be approximated by the superposition of Gaussian processes perturbed by a white noise.