Traffic characterization of the NSFNET national backbone
Steven A. Heimlich · 1990
Traditionally, models of packet arrival in communication networks have assumed either Poisson or compound Poisson arrival patterns. A study of a token ring local area network (LAN) at MIT [5] found that packet arrival followed neither of these models. Instead, traffic followed a more general model dubbed the “packet train,” which describes network traffic as a collection of packet streams traveling between pairs of nodes. A packet train consists of a number of packets travelling between a particular node pair.