Abstract
Internet traffic is composed of flows, sets of packets being transferred from one computer to another. Some visualizations for understanding the set of flows at a busy internet link are developed. These show graphically that the set of flows is dominated by a relatively few “elephants”, and a very large number of “mice”. It also becomes clear that “representative sampling” from heavy tail distributions is a challenging task.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Cleveland, W. S. (1993) Visualizing Data, Hobart Press, Summit, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Cleveland, W. S., Lin, D. and Sun, D. X. (2000) IP packet generation: statistical models for TCP start times based on connection-rate superposition, Performance Evaluation Review: Proc. ACM Sigmetrics 2000, 28, 166–177.
Cox, D. R. (1984) Long-Range Dependence: A Review, in Statistics: An Appraisal, Proceedings 50th Anniversary Conference.,H.A. David, H. T. David (eds.). The Iowa State University Press, 55–74.
Crovella, M. E. and A. Bestavros, A. (1996) Self-similarity in world wide web traffic evidence and possible causes, Proceedings of the ACM SIG-METRICS 96, pages 160–169, Philadelphia, PA.
Downey, A. B. (2001) Evidence for long tailed distributions in the internet, ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Workshop, November 2001. Internet available at http://rocky.wellesley.edu/downey/longtail/
Garrett, M. W. and Willinger, W. (1994). Analysis, Modeling and Generation of Self-Similar Video Traffic, Proc. of the ACM Sigcom ‘84, London, UK, 269–280
Gong, W., Liu, Y., Misra, V. and Towsley, D. (2001). On the tails of web file size distributions, Proceedings of 39-th Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing. Oct. 2001. Internet available at: http://www-net.cs.umass.edu/networks/publications.html
Hannig, J., Marron, J. S., Samorodnitsky, G. and Smith, F. D. (2001) Log-normal durations can give long range dependence, unpublished manuscript, web available at http://www.stat.unc.edu/postscript/papers/marron/NetworkData/LogNorm2LRD/
Heath, D., Resnick, S. and Samorodnitsky, G. (1998) Heavy tails and long range dependence in on/off processes and associated fluid models, Mathematics of Operations Research, 23, 145–165.
Hernandez-Campos, F., Marron, J. S., Samorodnitsky, G. and Smith, F. D. (2002) Variable Heavy Tailed Durations in Internet Traffic, unpublished manuscript, web available at http://www.stat.unc.edu/postscript/papers/marron/NetworkData/VarHeavyTails/
Marron, J. S., Hernandez-Campos, F. and Smith, F. D. (2001) A SiZer analysis of IP Flow start times, unpublished manuscript.
Leland, W. E., Taqqu, M. S., Willinger, W. and Wilson, D. V. (1994). On the Self-Similar Nature of Ethernet Traffic (Extended Version), IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking, 2, 1–15.
Mandelbrot, B. B. (1969) Long-run linearity, locally Gaussian processes, H-spectra and infinite variance, International Economic Review, 10, 82–113.
Nuzman, C., Saniee, I., Sweldens, W. and Weiss, A. (2002) A compound model for TCP connection arrivals for LAN and WAN applications, unpublished manuscript.
Paxson, V. (1994) Empirically-Derived Analytic Models of Wide-Area TCP, Connections. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2, 316–336.
Resnick, S. and Samorodnitsky, G. (1999) Activity periods of an infinite server queue and performance of certain heavy tailed fluid queues, Queueing Systems, 33, 43–71.
Smith, F. D., Hernandez, F., Jeffay, K. and Ott, D. (2001) “What TCP/IP Protocol Headers Can Tell Us About the Web”, Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS 2001/Performance 2001, Cambridge MA, June 2001, pp. 245–256.
Taqqu, M. and Levy, J. (1986) Using renewal processes to generate LRD and high variability, in: Progress in probability and statistics, E. Eberlein and M. Taqqu eds. Birkhaeuser, Boston, 73–89.
Tukey, J., and Tukey, P. (1990). Strips Displaying Empirical Distributions: Textured Dot Strips. Bellcore Technical Memorandum.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Marron, J.S., Hernandez-Campos, F., Smith, F.D. (2002). Mice and Elephants Visualization of Internet Traffic. In: Härdle, W., Rönz, B. (eds) Compstat. Physica, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-57489-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-57489-4_5
Publisher Name: Physica, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-7908-1517-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-57489-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive