Online EM algorithm for mixture with application to internet traffic modeling

Since histograms of many real network traces show strong evidence of mixture, this paper uses mixture distributions to model Internet traffic and applies the EM algorithm to fit the models. Making use of the fact that at each iteration of the EM algorithm the parameter increment has a positive projection on the gradient of the likelihood function, this paper proposes an online EM algorithm to fit themodels and the Bayesian Information Criterion is applied to select the best model. Experimental results on real traces are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.