How many traffic sources are enough?

A usual way of creating Long Range Dependent (LRD) traffic is by the superposition of on-off sources. The question that how many sources are enough to make a realistic Internet simulation, has not been theoretically explained till yet. It has now become relevant, as the simulation technology is faced with the challenge of simulating high speed networks. As traffic sources consume computing power, it is logical to use as small a number of sources as possible without compromising the quality of the simulations. We first introduce a simple aggregation strategy at the session level, and define its limits by recognizing that the number of active sources follows a certain distribution. By comparing mean packet End-to-End (E2E) delay we show the effectiveness of this technique. Our results show that the average number of active sources has a correlation with mean packet E2E delay.