Internet research

[Ronald Rousseau]

Dear colleagues,

It seems that researchers at Bell Lab have found interesting results on the
statistical behavior of Internet packets. Besides proving nonstationarity (not
surprising !) they found that at low traffic rates interarrival times have
marginal distributions that are well-approximated by Weibull distributions; if
however, the traffic rates increase then these Weibull distributions tend to an
exponential distribution, and interarrival times between packets become almost
independent. This means that at higher rates the packet inter-arrivals are
almost a Poisson process, so that at those rates the Internet behaves like
classical telephony. Recall that it was one of the surprising discoveries of
the 1990's that the Internet was - statistically - different from classical
telephone lines. Now, these Bell Lab investigators state that it all depends on
the traffic rates.

The articles, by Cao, Cleveland, Lin and Sun, can be found at:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/InternetTraffic/webpapers.html


Best regards,

Ronald Rousseau
dr. mathematics, dr. information science
KHBO - Industrial Sciences and Technology
Zeedijk 101    B-8400  Oostende   Belgium
Honorary Professor Henan Normal University (Xinxiang, China)
E-mail: ronald.rousseau at kh.khbo.be
web page:  users.pandora.be/ronald.rousseau