A Multilevel ON/OFF Model for Multifractal Internet Traffic

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