Some Remarks on ON/OFF Network Traffic

One of the most attractive self-similar traffic generating methods is ON/OFF model due to its clear physical explanation. However, the simulated traffic may show very strange characteristics, e.g. the estimated Hurst parameters for simulated traffics are larger than 1 and are almost equal despite of their different ON period parameters because of wrong sampling interval. In this paper, we point out that we should pay attention to two aspects when we use ON/OFF model to simulate network traffic. First, the first part of the simulated traffic is non-stationary and should be cut off. Second, the simulated traffic might be extremely over-sampled. The simulated traffics with appropriate sampling interval and non-stationary part cut off show satisfying result.