Capturing TCP Burstiness in Light-weight Simulations

Polly Huang and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

Burstiness in data traffic is emerging as a critical property that protocol analysis nowadays can no longer ignore. To preserve the kind of burstiness or scaling phenomena observed in aggregated TCP traffic, we develop a behavior model that captures TCP's window-based and closed-loop control. Through a novel modeling technique--exhaustive state exploration, we systematically examine each TCP states over a restricted range of connection length and packet loss. This restricted rane covers the TCP behavior most common to web exchanges. When connections step outside this range (becoming too long or taking more than one loss) we preserve simulation accuracy by taking an abstraction fault and changing to a more detailed model. By counting packets with interarrival times falling into certain critical intervals--round trip time (RTT) or retransmission timeout (RTO), we are abale to create finite state automaton (FSA) with states and transitions indicating rounds of back-to-back packet tranmissions. We demonstrate that an FSA approximation of TCP can produce light-weight simulation models of TCP suitable for background traffic, and that these models accurately reproduce multifractal scaling behavior in IP network traffic.

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Reference

Huang00a

Polly Huang and John Heidemann. Capturing TCP Burstiness in Light-weight Simulations. Technical Report 92, Institut füur Technische Informatik, ETH Züurich, September, 2000. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Huang00a.html>.

@techreport{Huang00a,
	author = "Polly Huang and John Heidemann",
	title = "Capturing {TCP} Burstiness in Light-weight Simulations",
	institution = "Institut f{\"u}r Technische Informatik, ETH Z{\"u}rich",
	year = "2000",
	number = "92",
	month = "September",
	keywords = "fsa tcp, tcp abstraction, modeling short tcp connnections",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Huang00a.html",
	psurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Huang00a.ps.gz",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Huang00a.pdf",
	otherpsurl = "http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/~huang/publication/fsa-sim.ps.gz",
	otherpdfurl = "http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/~huang/publication/fsa-sim.pdf.gz",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
}

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