IP Packet Level vBNS Tra c Analysis and Modeling

In order to ensure continued availability of high-performance network for the nation's research and education community and to continue supporting the development of new high performance Internet capabilities, the National Science Foundation (NSF) established the very-high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) through a cooperative agreement with MCI telecommunications Corporation. To ensure quality of service (QoS) provided by vBNS, an important task is to understand characteristics of vBNS tra c. In this paper we show that vBNS tra c has long-range-dependent (LRD) properties, which have been observed in LAN, WAN, WWW, and VBR video tra c traces. However, we also show that the burstiness of vBNS tra c varies from trace to trace, indicating considerable spatial variations of tra c features, and cannot be characterized by the Hurst parameter. We develop a generalized multifractal model for vBNS tra c. The model contains two parameters, is easy to construct, and generates short-range-dependent processes and ideal multiplicative multifractal processes as special cases. The power of the proposed process in modeling the vBNS tra c is