The Effects of Traffic Self-Similarity on TCP Performance

Abstract

Recent measurements of network traffic have shown that self-similarity is a ubiquitous phenomenon present in both local area and wide area traffic traces. In this paper, we investigate the impact of scale-invariant burstiness on network performance including its effect on throughput, packet loss rate, response time, and buffer occupancy. This is done in the context of a client/server network model using transport and network layer simulations. First, we study the effect of self-similarity on performance when a UDP-based unreliable transport protocol is employed and network resources including bottleneck buffer capacity and bandwidth are varied. We find that as the degree of self-similarity is increased, all performance variables deteriorate superlinearly. The severity of the performance degradation is related to the greediness of the application agent, decreasing with the increased throttling of the average output rate. The degree of self-similarity is controlled by a novel mechanism b..