FLFMTW-TCPSST-05
Daniel R. Figueiredo, Benyuan Liu, Anja Feldmann, Vishal Misra, Don Towsley, Walter Willinger. On TCP and self-similar traffic. Performance Evaluation, special issue on Long range dependence and heavy tail distributions, 61(2):129-141, 2005.
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Abstract
We re-examine the same TCP trace that was used by Veres et al. [A. Veres, M. Boda, The chaotic nature of TCP congestion control, in: Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM, 2000] to claim that TCP creates self-similar traffic. A careful reassessment of their data analysis shows that this claim is not justified and suggests that the TCP trace in question is not consistent with (asymptotic second-order) self-similarity or long-range dependence (LRD). We illustrate the reasons that led to the claim in [A. Veres, M. Boda, The chaotic nature of TCP congestion control, in: Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM, 2000] and provide some practical guidelines for assessing a statistical characteristic of trace data such as LRD that is defined in strictly asymptotic terms. Our conclusion is in full agreement with the findings obtained from analyzing a much longer TCP trace (resulting from repeating the same simulation as in [A. Veres, M. Boda, The chaotic nature of TCP congestion control, in: Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM, 2000], but running it for a longer period) and with analytical results derived from a detailed Markovian model of TCP. These results show that the traffic generated by a long-lived TCP connection, while exhibiting pronounced correlations over a predictable finite range of time-scales, cannot be (asymptotically second-order) self-similar or exhibit LRD. Our work serves as a reminder of the importance of careful trace analysis and detailed examination (and cross-validation) of alternative explanations when establishing or characterizing the generality of any particular finding about Internet traffic.
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BibTex Reference
@article{FLFMTW-TCPSST-05,
Author = {R. Figueiredo, Daniel and Liu, Benyuan and Feldmann, Anja and Misra, Vishal and Towsley, Don and Willinger, Walter},
Title = {On TCP and self-similar traffic},
Journal = {Performance Evaluation, special issue on Long range dependence and heavy tail distributions},
Volume = {61},
Number = {2},
Pages = {129--141},
Publisher = {Elsevier Science Publishers B. V},
Address = {Amsterdam, The Netherlands, The Netherlands},
Year = {2005}
}
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