Mice and Elephants Visualization of Internet Traffic
James Stephen Marron, Félix Hernández-Campos, F. Donelson Smith · COMPSTAT · 2002
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.