Designing traffic profiles for bursty Internet traffic

The paper proposes a new class of traffic profiles that is better suited for metering bursty Internet traffic streams than the traditional token bucket profile. A good traffic profile should satisfy two criteria: first, it should consider packets from a conforming traffic stream as in-profile with high probability to ensure a strong QoS guarantee; second, it should limit the network resources consumed by a non-conforming traffic stream to no more than that consumed by a conforming stream. We model a bursty Internet traffic stream as an ON/OFF stream, where both the ON-period and the OFF-period have a heavy-tailed distribution. Our study shows that the heavy-tailed distribution leads to an excessive randomness in the long-term session rate distribution. Therefore, it is inherently difficult for any profile that limits the long-term average session rate to give a strong QoS guarantee for the conforming traffic streams. Our simulation demonstrates that a token bucket profile that couples the average rate control and the burst size control has a weak QoS guarantee. Based on this result, we propose a new class of traffic profiles that decouples the long term average rate control from the burst size control. Compared to a token bucket profile, this profile improves the level of QoS for a conforming traffic stream, yet limits the "effective bandwidth" consumed by a non-conforming traffic stream.