On the Spikiness of Internet Traffic 1
Konstantinos E. Drakakis, Dragan Radulović · 2007
Internet traffic on a network link appears in various degrees of spikiness. We identify the Slow Start feature of the TCP protocol and the heavy-tailed distribution of the session sizes as the major causes of spikiness, and demonstrate that spikiness is triggered by an interplay between the Slow Start maximum rate and the number of users on the link. We provide an Internet traffic model which simulates the observed spikiness, as well as tools to quantify it. 1