Title:

The Changing Nature of Network Traffic Analysis and Modeling

Author:

Walter Willinger
AT&T Labs - Research
Email: walter@research.att.com
Abstract: Historically, the areas of traffic data analysis and modeling have suffered from a severe ``drought'' of data. However, more recently, this drought has been replaced by a ``flood'' of traffic measurements from today's high-speed communication networks that keeps increasing in volume and speed. As a result of these changes, network research (in particluar, traffic analysis and traffic modeling) has started to adopt concepts that have a long tradition in the physical sciences but have been all but ignored in the social sciences and in the mainstream statistics literature.

In this talk, I will show how these concepts apply to modern network traffic analysis and modeling, and I will illustrate some of the concepts with examples of measured Internet, LAN and VBR video traffic. I will also comment on their implications on traffic engineering and performance analysis of curent and future high-speed networks.