Difficulties of simulation: Heterogenity of topology, protocol, link properties. Also the changing nature of the internet, e.g. routes changing all the time, trend of applications, topology, router features.

Invariants of internet:

  • Diurnal patterns of activity: Daily patterns of activity
  • Self-similarity of packet arrivals
  • Poisson session arrivals: Session means high-level human activities
  • Log-normal connection sizes (size in bytes/duration in seconds of connection)
  • Heavy-tailed distributions: Pareto distribution with shape \(\alpha<2\)
    • Not clear how log-normal and heavy-tail are related
  • For telnet-like session, the packet distribution is Pareto

Bibliographic data

@article{
   title = "Difficulties in Simulating the Internet",
   author = "Floyd and Paxson",
   journal = "Trans Networking",
   year = "2001",
}