Revisiting coexistence of poissonity and self-similarity in Internet traffic

The immense popularity of new-age “Web 2.0” applications such as YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook, and non-Web applications such as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing, Voice over IP, online games, and media streaming have significantly altered the composition of Internet traffic with respect to what it was a few years ago. In light of these changes, this paper revisits Internet traffic characteristics and models that were proposed when “traditional” Web traffic was the largest contributor to Internet traffic. Specifically, we study whether or not the following characteristics, namely: (1) traffic is self-similar and long-range dependent, and (2) traffic can be approximated by Poisson at smaller time scales, are still valid. Our experiments on recent traces show that these traffic characteristics continue to hold. We further argue that current Internet traffic can be viewed to have two key constituents, namely Web+ and P2P+; Web+ traffic consists of traffic from both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications; P2P+ traffic consists largely of traffic from P2P applications and other non-Web applications excluding applications on well-known ports such as FTP and SMTP. We then show that both Web+ and P2P+ components exhibit self-similar behavior and can be approximated by Poisson at smaller time scales.