Analysis and modeling of a campus wireless network TCP/IP traffic

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2009.06.002 Byline: Ian W.C. Lee, Abraham O. Fapojuwo Keywords: Wireless TCP; Long-range dependence; Multifractals; Cascades; IP; Heavy-tailed distribution Abstract: In this paper we analyzed and modeled wireless TCP/IP traffic. Specifically, we focused on the interarrival times of TCP flows and the number of packets within a flow. We show that the marginal distribution of the flow interarrival times is piecewise Weibull distributed. Second and higher order statistics show that the flow interarrival times are long-range dependent and exhibit multifractal scaling. Taking these higher order properties into consideration, we proposed a multinomial canonical cascade with 3 stages to model the flow interarrival times. Looking at the IP layer, we find that the number of packets in a flow is heavy-tailed distributed. Especially interesting is that in 2 of our data sets, the number of packets in a flow possesses infinite mean. The interarrival time of packets within a flow is highly correlated, bursty, and its statistical characteristics vary from flow to flow. Author Affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4 Article History: Received 23 July 2007; Revised 10 March 2009; Accepted 8 June 2009 Article Note: (miscellaneous) Responsible Editor: R. Sivakumar