Modeling, simulation and measurements of queuing delay under long-tail internet traffic

In this paper we describe an analytical approach for estimating the queuing delay distribution on an Internet link carrying realistic TCP traffic, such as that produced by a large number of finite-size connections transferring files whose sizes are taken from a long-tail distribution. The analytical predictions are validated against detailed simulation experiments and real network measurements. Despite its simplicity, our model proves to be accurate and robust under a variety of operating conditions, and offers novel insights into the impact on the network of long-tail flow length distributions. Our contribution is a performance evaluation methodology that could be usefully employed in network dimensioning and engineering.