On Wed, 8 Nov 1995, Dennis Ferguson wrote:
I just have a memory which is good at storing facts. Sometime in the last month on either nanog or com-priv a person whose name escapes me posted
Oh, man, this is getting so silly I can hardly bear to look in my mail box. If you'd wanted to name someone who'd been recently working at measuring and statistically characterizing Internet traffic you could have just cut-and-pasted the name on the top line of your note,
Didn't I say I can't remember the name? Didn't I say I am not an expert in this field of endeavor?
who you contradicted on a related point of fact based on something you half-remember reading in com-priv.
Somebody else was kind enough to point me to a WWW site that covers some of the work that HWB and k claffy have done. In a paper which they posted on the web, I found this statement: For example, one characteristic of network workload is `burstiness', which reflects variance in traffic rate. Network behavioral patterns of burstiness are important for defining, evaluating, and verifying service specifications, but there is not yet agreement in the Internet community on the best metrics to define burstiness. Several researchers [21,22,6] have explored the failure of Poisson models to adequately characterize the burstiness of both local and wide area Internet traffic. This is precisely the item that I am focussing on because I believe it partially explains why service is not improving. I also believe that if Internet traffic continues to have this non-Poisson characteristic then the efforts of NSP's to maintain high service levels will not be as effective as might be expected. Although I don't know whether telco POTS service exhibits Poisson characteristics, I suspect that it doesn't and plays a large part in helping them maintain near perfect service levels. At the time I first read of this discovery, I filed away the information because I felt it was useful in helping my customers understand why sometimes the Internet works fast for them and sometimes it is jerky and erratic. So, is this right or wrong? Does this non-Poisson characteristic explain why the network performance tends to be erratic? Or is it a minor factor not worth worrying about (operationally) at the present time? Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-542-4130 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com