A Multilevel ON/OFF Model for Multifractal Internet Traffic

Abstract

In this paper, an open-loop multilevel ON/OFF modelis proposed to capture the multifractal behavior of the HTTPtraffic on the Internet. It is assumed that the life time of aTCP session and the active time of a burst within a TCP session have a heavy-tail type distribution. The aggregatetraffic of this model is shown to be multifractal. We analyze itssecond and higher order statistics by the wavelet analysis anddevelop a simple method to estimate the model parameters from areal Internet trace. We show that real and synthesized trafficproduce the same Logscale Diagram with accuracy, for properselection of the model parameter. Finally, we compare using theNS-2 simulator the queueing behavior of FIFO queues fed by realand synthetic traffic demands.