On the autocorrelation structure of TCP traffic

The statistical characteristics of network traffic - in particular the observation that it can exhibit long range dependence - have received considerable attention from the research community over the past few years. In addition, the recent claims that the TCP protocol can generate traffic with long rage dependent behavior has also received much attention. Contrary to the latter claims, in this paper we show that the TCP protocol can generate traffic with correlation structures that spans only an analytically predictable finite range of time-scales. We identify and analyze separately the two mechanisms within TCP that are responsible for this scaling behavior: timeouts and congestion avoidance. We provide analytical models for both mechanisms that, under the proper loss probabilities, accurately predict the range in time-scales and the strength of the sustained correlation structure of the traffic sending rate of a single TCP source. We also analyze an existing comprehensive model of ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: CN
• Authors: Daniel R. Figueiredo, Benyuan Liu, Vishal Misra, Donald F. Towsley
• Keywords: CN 2002, Long Range Dependence, Predictable Finite Range, TCP Protocol