On-line Modeling of Non-stationary Network Traffic with Schwarz Information Criterion

Modeling of network traffic is a fundamental building block of computer science. Measurements of network traffic demonstrate that self-similarity is one of the basic properties of the network traffic possess at large time-scale. This paper investigates the change of non-stationary self-similarity of network traffic over time,and proposes a method of combining the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and Schwarz information criterion (SIC) to detect change points of self-similarity in network traffic. The traffic is segmented into pieces around changing points with homogenous characteristics for the Hurst parameter,named local Hurst parameter,and then each piece of network traffic is modeled using fractional Gaussian noise (FGN) model with the local Hurst parameter. The presented experimental performance on data set from the Internet Traffic Archive (ITA) demonstrates that the method is more accurate in describing the non-stationary self-similarity of network traffic.