IP Traffic Modeling

The goal of this work is to give an overview and investigate traffic models developed for IP networks. Traffic models are statistical models used to describe network traffic. There are models which considers the population of users explicitly and each user is modeled separately, while others consider traffic aggregates, originating from a set of users and individual users are not modeled. Traffic models can be used to estimate network load and can help in network infrastructure planning and network resource dimensioning. The most prominent example is the traffic model used in circuit switched telephone networks. However, there are different applications with different characteristics in IP networks, which makes modeling more complex. The main objective is to review known traffic models, to classify them, and to evaluate their pros and cons. Models for different applications, like VoIP, web traffic, or file transfer, shall be addressed and investigated.