The role of the Weibull distribution in Internet traffic modeling
Asad Arfeen, Krzysztof Pawlikowski, Donald C. McNickle, Andreas Willig · 2013
This paper highlights the important role played by the two parameter Weibull distribution in Internet traffic modeling. Internet traffic structurally consists of sessions, flows and packets; and traverses through different tiers of service providers during its end-to-end journey. Observation of invariant heavy tails in access traffic patterns of individual users has motivated us to investigate traffic transformation/aggregation as it traverses from access to core network. We found that the flexible nature of the Weibull distribution can capture this transformation at inter-arrival level. We also present and justify our hypothesis that given a suitable scale parameter specific to a certain access media or tier, the Weibull shape parameter can be used to zoom in from session to flow and to the packet level inter-arrivals.