Structural Modeling of RealAudio traffic

This paper identifies the structural properties of RealAudio traffic and develops an application-level model based on trace analysis and simulation studies. RealAudio traffic is quite different from web traffic and constant bit rate traffic, models commonly used for Internet and multimedia traffic respectively today. We demonstrate that RealAudio has rich behavior across a range of time scales, with regularity at large time scales, strong periodicities from RTT to a few seconds, and complex behavior at small time scales. A simulation model was developed which captures the main structural characteristics of RealAudio, and demonstrate the importance of multi-scale analysis in validating this model. We also demonstrate via simulation that RealAudio loss rates can be noticeably reduced by slightly changing its characteristics to reduce burstiness. Although our results focus on Real Audio traffic, this methodology may be useful for studies of other types of real-time streaming media. Keywords— RealAudio, Structural model, Multi-scale analysis