[...]
Oh, man, this is getting so silly I can hardly bear to look in my
mail box. If you'd wanted to name someone who'd been recently working
at measuring and statistically characterizing Internet traffic you could
have just cut-and-pasted the name on the top line of your note, who you
contradicted on a related point of fact based on something you half-remember
reading in com-priv.
We're doomed, aren't we?
Dennis Ferguson
> I just have a memory which is good at storing facts. Sometime in the last
> month on either nanog or com-priv a person whose name escapes me posted
Oh, man, this is getting so silly I can hardly bear to look in my
mail box. If you'd wanted to name someone who'd been recently working
at measuring and statistically characterizing Internet traffic you could
have just cut-and-pasted the name on the top line of your note,
Didn't I say I can't remember the name? Didn't I say I am not an expert
in this field of endeavor?
who you
contradicted on a related point of fact based on something you half-remember
reading in com-priv.
Somebody else was kind enough to point me to a WWW site that covers some
of the work that HWB and k claffy have done. In a paper which they posted
on the web, I found this statement:
For example, one characteristic of network workload is `burstiness',
which reflects variance in traffic rate. Network behavioral patterns of
burstiness are important for defining, evaluating, and verifying service
specifications, but there is not yet agreement in the Internet community
on the best metrics to define burstiness. Several researchers [21,22,6]
have explored the failure of Poisson models to adequately
characterize the burstiness of both local and wide area Internet
traffic.
This is precisely the item that I am focussing on because I believe it
partially explains why service is not improving. I also believe that if
Internet traffic continues to have this non-Poisson characteristic then
the efforts of NSP's to maintain high service levels will not be
as effective as might be expected. Although I don't know whether telco
POTS service exhibits Poisson characteristics, I suspect that it doesn't
and plays a large part in helping them maintain near perfect service levels.
At the time I first read of this discovery, I filed away the information
because I felt it was useful in helping my customers understand why
sometimes the Internet works fast for them and sometimes it is jerky and
erratic.
So, is this right or wrong? Does this non-Poisson characteristic explain
why the network performance tends to be erratic? Or is it a minor factor
not worth worrying about (operationally) at the present time?
Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-542-4130
http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com