On the characteristics and origins of internet flow rates

This paper considers the distribution of the rates at which flows transmit data, and the causes of these rates. First, using packet level traces from several Internet links, and summary flow statistics from an ISP backbone, we examine Internet flow rates and the relationship between the rate and other flow characteristics such as size and duration. We find, as have others, that while the distribution of flow rates is skewed, it is not as highly skewed as the distribution of flow sizes. We also find that for large flows the size and rate are highly correlated. Second, we attempt to determine the cause of the rates at which flows transmit data by developing a tool, T-RAT, to analyze packet-level TCP dynamics. In our traces, the most frequent causes appear to be network congestion and receiver window limits.

[1]  John M. Chambers,et al.  Graphical Methods for Data Analysis , 1983 .

[2]  John Nagle,et al.  Congestion control in IP/TCP internetworks , 1984, CCRV.

[3]  Ralph B. D'Agostino,et al.  Goodness-of-Fit-Techniques , 2020 .

[4]  Walter Willinger,et al.  On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic , 1993, SIGCOMM '93.

[5]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Wide area traffic: the failure of Poisson modeling , 1995, TNET.

[6]  Azer Bestavros,et al.  Self-similarity in World Wide Web traffic: evidence and possible causes , 1997, TNET.

[7]  Luigi Rizzo,et al.  Dummynet: a simple approach to the evaluation of network protocols , 1997, CCRV.

[8]  Vern Paxson,et al.  Automated packet trace analysis of TCP implementations , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[9]  Robert Tappan Morris,et al.  Dynamics of random early detection , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[10]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  Analyzing stability in wide-area network performance , 1997, SIGMETRICS '97.

[11]  R. Wilder,et al.  Wide-area Internet traffic patterns and characteristics , 1997, IEEE Netw..

[12]  Vern Paxson,et al.  End-to-end routing behavior in the Internet , 1996, TNET.

[13]  Farnam Jahanian,et al.  Internet routing instability , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[14]  Vern Paxson.  End-to-end internet packet dynamics , 1999, TNET.

[15]  Mark Allman,et al.  A web server's view of the transport layer , 2000, CCRV.

[16]  Ratul Mahajan,et al.  Controlling high-bandwidth flows at the congested router , 2001, Proceedings Ninth International Conference on Network Protocols. ICNP 2001.

[17]  Richard G. Baraniuk,et al.  Connection-level analysis and modeling of network traffic , 2001, IMW '01.

[18]  Hao Jiang,et al.  Passive estimation of TCP round-trip times , 2002, CCRV.

[19]  Scott Shenker,et al.  Approximate fairness through differential dropping , 2003, CCRV.