Structural Modeling of RealAudio Traffic

Kun-chan Lan and John Heidemann
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

This paper identifies the structural properties of RealAudio traffic, develops an application-level model and validates the model using multi-scale analytic techniques. RealAudio traffic is quite different from web traffic and constant bit rate traffic, models commonly used for Internet and multimedia traffic respectively today. We demonstrate that RealAudio has rich behavior across a range of time scales, with regularity at large time scales, strong peiodicities from RTT to a few seconds, and complex behavior at small time scales. A simulation model was developed which captures the main structural characteristics of RealAudio, and demonstrates the importance of multi-scale analysis in validating this model. We also demonstrate via simu- lation that RealAudio loss rates can be noticeably reduced by slightly changing its characteristics to reduce burstiness. Although our results focus on Real Audio traffic, this methodology may be useful for studies of other types of real-time streaming media.

Availability

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Reference

Lan01a

Kun-chan Lan and John Heidemann. Structural Modeling of RealAudio Traffic. Technical Report ISI-TR-544, USC/Information Sciences Institute, September, 2001. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Lan01a.html>.

@techreport{Lan01a,
	author = "Kun-chan Lan and John Heidemann",
	title = "Structural Modeling of {RealAudio} Traffic",
	institution = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	year = "2001",
	number = "ISI-TR-544",
	month = "September",
	keywords = "real audio, structural modeling, ",
	otherurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~kclan/paper/ramodel.ps",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Lan01a.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Lan01a.pdf",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
}

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