Analysis of Network Throughput Dynamics with Viscoelastic Material Model

Network throughput of the best-effort networks as typified by the Internet and wireless networks is often insufficient for multimedia communication, and it spoils the quality of communication. Therefore, it is important to analyze a dynamic characteristics of the throughput when multimedia traffic is injected. We point out that the dynamics of the throughput has the viscosity and the elasticity because of an interaction among traffic passing through the network. We also introduce a viscoelastic material model to analyze the throughput. A total of 120 simulations were performed with an ns-2 simulation model. The results of simulations showed that the dynamics of the throughput does indeed have the viscoelasticity. Furthermore, we found that our proposed model can be used to analyze the throughput dynamics with a fit rate of about 90% on a wired network, and about 80% on a wireless one. This fact proved that there was an analogous relationship between variation of throughput and deformation of the viscoelastic material. We believe that we have developed a novel science field of Network Rheology.