The Effect of Statistical Multiplexing on Internet Pack Traffic: Theory and Empirical Study

A the active connection load (ACL) on an Internet link increases, the statistical properties of packet inter-arrivals and sizes change due to increased statistical multiplexing of packets from different connections. Chief among these results is that the long-range dependence of the inter-arrivals and sizes goes locally to independence The results are based on (1) the mathematical theory of superposition of marked point processes, and (2) empirical study of 3026 packet traces, each 5 minutes or 90 seconds in duration, from 6 monitors on Internet links ranging from 100 mbps to 622 mbps. An understanding of packet inter-arrivals and sizes is important because it is packets that devices must send and receive, and the burstiness of traffic as seen by the devices is determined by the statistical characteristics of these two variables. The results for inter-arrivals and sizes do not conflict with previous well known results about the statistical properties of packet and byte counts in fixed time intervals, but the counts do have a different change in statistical properties with the ACL.