Reduction of self-similarity by application-level traffic shaping

Recent work has demonstrated that network traffic has self similar properties. These properties make short term control of traffic very difficult. Heavy tailed distributions of burst sizes contribute to traffic self similarity. The effects of heavy tailed file transfer traffic on queueing behavior are demonstrated using a simulated traffic source based on empirical Unix file size data. A method of application level traffic shaping, whereby selected large traffic bursts are shaped, is developed. This shaping method is shown to dramatically decrease ATM cell loss at a bottleneck queue. At the expense of a few large file transfers being increased in time duration, many smaller file transfers are decreased in time duration and cell loss is decreased for all file transfers.