Analysis of Traffic Measurements in the VISTAnet Gigabit Networking Testbed

The characterization of ATM traffic is particularly important for developing and validating traffic models for the analysis of congestion control mechanisms, communication network protocols, and architectures for ATM networks. Unfortunately, little is known about the actual behavior of ATM traffic, since few ATM networks have been built and instrumented for measuring traffic. In this paper, we present an analysis of traffic mea1 Supported in part by BellSouth, GTE Corporation, and NSF and DARPA under cooperative agreement NCR-8919038 with the Corporation for National Research Initiative. surements from a medical application called Dynamic Radiation Therapy Planning which runs in a distributed fashion on the VISTAnet gigabit networking test bed. We believe that ours is one of the first measurements of traffic from a real application operating in a high-speed networking environment employing ATM technology. We show that our traffic measurements fit neatly into a proposed hierarchical traffic model which describes the traffic source behavior at different time-scales.