Traffic characterization of the NSFNET national backbone

Traditionally, models of packet arrival in communication networks have assumed either Poisson or compound Poisson arrival patterns. A study of a token ring local area network (LAN) at MIT [5] found that packet arrival followed neither of these models. Instead, traffic followed a more general model dubbed the "packet train," which describes network traffic as a collection of packet streams traveling between pairs of nodes. A packet train consists of a number of packets travelling between a particular node pair. This study examines the existence of packet trains on NSFNET, a high speed national backbone network. Train characteristics on NSFNET are not as striking as those found on the MIT local network; however, certain protocols exhibit quite strong train behavior given the great number of hosts communicating through the backbone. Descriptions of the packet train model can be found in [3] and [5].