In recent years, several studies have shown that network traffic exhibits the property of self-similarity. Traditional (Poissonian) modelling approaches have been shown not to be able to describe this property and generally lead to the underestimation of interesting performance measures. Crovella and Bestavros have shown that network traffic that is due to World Wide Web transfers shows characteristics of self-similarity and they argue that this can be explained by the heavy-tailedness of many of the involved distributions. Considering these facts, developing methods which are able to handle self-similarity and heavy-tailedness is of great importance for network capacity planing purposes. In this paper we discuss two methods to fit hyper-exponential distributions to data sets which exhibit heavy-tails. One method is taken from the literature and shown to fall short. The other, new method, is shown to perform well in a number of case studies.

Date Published: 24 July 2001
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 4523, Internet Performance and Control of Network Systems II, (24 July 2001); doi: 10.1117/12.434316

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4523:
Internet Performance and Control of Network Systems II
Robert D. van der Mei; Frank Huebner-Szabo de Bucs, Editor(s)