International Journal of Advanced Computer Science, Vol. 3, No. 6, Pp. 304-309, Jun., 2013.

Multifractal Nature of Wireless Network Traffic

Jeferson Wilian de Godoy Stnico & Lee Luan Ling
Manuscript
Received: 3, Apr., 2013 Revised: 21,Apr., 2013 Accepted: 9,May, 2013 Published: 15,May, 2013

Keywords
Wireless Network Traffic, Traffic Analysis, Monofractal Process Multifractal Processes.

Abstract In this paper, we analyze the wireless network traffic from the perspective of multifractal theory. For this, initially we do brief account of the origin of the traffic analysis, then we will present the definitions of self-similar processes and multifractal and the reasons that led us to opt for the multifractal analysis of wireless network traffic. Finally, we analyze the main characteristics of the multifractal traffic, showing that talk only the traffic is self-similarity could lead to mistakes in planning the design of a network.

1. Introduction
Based on the assumption that wireless networks are capable of performing the same procedures than a wired network, did with that there was a large increase in their use and consequently an expansion of its transmission rate, but the second [1], its performance still not get the same performance of wired networks. At first, the traffic of wireless networks in the most part was originally from web applications, and file transfers, remote access and email. However, the wireless networks were not limited to this type of traffic, over the years a higher traffic load and more complex applications occurred, among these applications we can cite the sharing of photos and videos between the users. We also consider the significant increase in users accessing wireless networks, and this implies a large increase in traffic volume, allowing it a non-uniform distribution of traffic load over the coverage area, this is due the heterogeneity of users. All this makes necessary a careful planning of an entire infrastructure based wireless network with the mobility pattern of users. The introduction of new technologies, primarily driven by the large number of devices (smartphones and tables), it also becomes an important point in the type of traffic on the wireless networks work. The new devices access the wireless network brought a variety of traffic, allowing a popularization of multimedia services, which opened the door to applications such as voice
Jeferson Wilian de Godoy Stnico and Lee Luan Ling are with School of Electrical and Computer Engineering , State University of Campinas Unicamp, PO Box 6101-13.083-970, Campinas, SP, Brazil, e-mail: {jefer son,le e}@ decom.fee.unicamp.br
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over IP (VoIP) and IPTV. Applications like IPTV will involve all sorts of video distribution over IP, for example, video clips, TV and video conferences, and if we take into account the increase in picture quality in the demand for High-Definition (HD), transmission rates and the amount of traffic on wireless networks will increase tremendously. Thinking of all these perspectives, project any type of wireless network, makes it taken into consideration the type of application and your performance needs. However one of the main problems to be considered in multi-service networks is the nature of aggregate traffic and its impact on network performance. Several mathematical models have been proposed to characterize the traditional TCP / IP traffic. One of the main in this type of traffic analysis were Leland et al [2], they found experimentally that the network traffic collected from Ethernet do Bellcore Morristown Reaserch and Engineering Center, exhibit fractal properties such as self-similarity and long-range dependence (LRD), which cannot be adequately described by classical models such as Markov and Poisson. Investigations involving WAN TCP / IP traffic in [3][4] found that the different properties of the traffic observed at small time scales were adequately described using multifractal analysis. However, the previously mentioned studies present results of analysis of traffic coming from wired networks, based on the multifractal analysis in this paper we will study the multifractal characteristics of traffic from a wireless network, widely investigated in the scientific community [5][6][7]. The traffic analysis was collected in the 62nd meeting Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) [8]. We will demonstrate by some simulations that only consider the monofractal (self-similar) characteristics traffic from the wireless network is not enough, we will can see that traffic analyzed present several features of multifractal traffic. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we make briefly discretion of wireless network traffic analysis. Section 3 presents the definition of monofractal and multifractal processes. In Section 4 we will analyze the existing of multifractal properties of the wireless network traffic. Finally, Section 5 we present our conclusions.

2. The Traffic
Traffic was collected in the link layer, from a large-scale wireless network at the 62nd Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting [8]. The meeting took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota on day 6-11 March, 2005, and attended by 1,138 participants. Most participants used laptops or other wireless devices. During two days were collected 57 million frames and about 45 gigabytes of data.

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Figure 1, withdrawn of [5], show the locations of APs and sniffers on the rooms during the conference sessions daily and evening, some temporary walls were removed to the formation of a large hall. It was observed that the access points exchanged of channels 1, 6 and 11 dynamically to occur balance the number of users and traffic volume in the three channels of the meeting. The network used in the IETF has 38 access points (AP) all using the IEEE802.11b protocol distributed on three floors. Each physical AP supports four virtual or logical APs, and thus having a total of 152 APs available to participants. Capture of the traffic occurred on the floor where the conferences were being held, where they were located 23 physical APs, and other physical APs were in two adjacent floors. The collect data at the MAC layer of the network method was used vicinity sniffing [5]. For this study, we analyzed a series of traffic collected in the sections in a conference, through channel 1. The data collected are from the day 09/03/2005, beginning in 20:00:52 and the end 20:40:27. Traffic is called chan1dump-03-09_00009_20050309170052 - anon [5], having 1.791.474 packets.

3. Characterization of Monofractal and Multifractal Processes

Definition 1: A process t is called monofractal (self-similar), when the following relationship is hold: t

(Equ. 1)

where 0 < H < 1, (known as Hurst parameter) and the symbol d representing equality in distribution. We can note that a monofractal process is defined in terms of the Hurst parameter. The Hurst parameter measures the degree of self-similarity of the process and is basically a measure of the decay of the autocorrelation function. There are several methods in the literature for estimating the Hurst parameter, we can mention among these methods, Aggregate Variance [9], Rescaled Range R/S [10], Periodogram [11], Absolute Moments [12], Variance of Residual [13], Abry-Veitch Estimator [14] and Whittle Estimator [15]. Table 1 shows the values of the Hurst parameters of the methods mentioned above, obtained for a series of wireless traffic, of conference (IETF) [8]. We can observe a wide range of values found by methods, that is, if we take as example the Variance of Residuals method, demonstrates that the aggregate traffic exhibits a high degree of self-similarity, but the Whittle Estimator method shows that traffic has a low degree self-similarity, thus arises the some questions. What is the best method that accurately describes the self-similarity of traffic? The wireless traffic is truly self-similar? What scale of aggregation the self-similarity is recognized? Questions like these make it look the wireless network traffic, from the viewpoint of multifractal theory in traffic is not scanned by a single parameter, but for all its singularities. This will be the main focus of this work, analyze traffic on small time scales and show that indeed the wireless network traffic is multifractal. For this we define a multifractal process.
TABLE 1. HURST PARAMETER

Method Aggregate Variance R/S Periodogram Absolute Moments Variance of Residuals Abry-Veitch Estimator Whittle Estimator

H 0,8440 0,7000 0,7190 0,6910 0,9110 0,6530 0,5980

Fig. 1 Location of APs and Sniffer [5]

Definition 2: A stochastic process is called multifractal if it has stationary increments and satisfies: E | t |q = c q t q +1 = c q t 0
q

(Equ. 2)

for some positive values , [0 1] , q (scaling function) and c (q) (moment factor) are functions on
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domain and are independent of . The function , also known as the partition function, is concave with 0 = 1 [16]. We can see by Definition 2 multifractal processes are characterized by having moments with non-linear behavior scales, and by having regularity, dependents on , in an unpredictable manner. Thus, for characterize the singular structures present in a signal t , it is necessary to precisely quantify its regularity. The Lipschitz exponent provides uniform measures on a regular time intervals, and also at any isolated point. If t , has a singularity at the point , meaning that this function is not differentiable at , then the Lipschitz exponent, also known as Hlder exponent, characterizes this singular behavior [17]. Thus we define the pointwise Hlder exponent as follows: Definition 3: (Pointwise Hlder Exponent): Let be a real number and be a constant, both strictly positive, and . The function is if we can find a polynomial of degree such as: |

Thus, Hlder exponents with different values of are very important, since most of the variations in a multifractal function are in instants with Hlder exponent different of . The occurrence of different values of the Hlder exponents in process allows discriminating monofractal of multifractal. In the next section we will analyze other multifractal properties existing of wireless network traffic, that we will give support for say the wireless network traffic is multifractal.

4. Multifractal Analysis
One experiment is very usual in the traffic analysis occurs through the observations in different time scale. Usually it is stated that the traffic has self-similar characteristics, because for different time scales it has similar behavior, but in Figure 3 we analyze the real wireless network traffic in scales, 5, 25, 100, 500, and 1000 msec, and based only on observations is difficult to say who the traffic is really self-similar. Thus, this section we will make analyze of the main features using the theory of multifractal and we will show that the wireless network traffic is multifractal.
Real Traffic
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(Equ. 3)

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The pointwise Hlder exponent p of function is defined as:

f at
(Equ. 4)

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= sup{ > 0|

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Notice that such a polynomial can be found even the Taylor series expansion of around does not exist [18]. Figure 2 shows the traffic trace of wireless network, as well as their respective Pointwise Hlder exponent.
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Fig. 2 Up: samples of the real traffic of the wireless network. Down: Pointwise Hlder exponent.

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We can note in Figure 2 that for multifractal processes, although there are a value of Hlder exponent more frequent, other values of the Hlder exponents also occur.

Fig. 3 Wireless Network Traffic at Different Time scales

The estimation of the multifractal feature presents two

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2

approaches. The first approach is based on the estimation of the partition function of the process, while the second is on the estimation of the regularity of the process, i.e., its multifractal spectrum. A. Estimation of the Partition Function Based on Definition 2 we see that the description of a multifractal process involves both knowledge of the function c q and the function q . Below, we present a simple method to test the multifractal characteristics of the process, as well as to estimate the functions c q and q . Consider the data =1 to support the interval[0 ], on a scale = , it is defined as the sum partition:
/ = =1 ( ) where
(q)

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6 q

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Fig. 5 Partition Function

(Equ. 5)

= (Equ. 6) =1 1 + it is original process is observed on a aggregation scale = . . For a fixed value of , vary the values of in a proper range, obtaining a set of points in the plane log log . Case log it is approximately linear dependent on log , we say that the data show multifractal scaling. Based on this property in Figure 4 we plot the partition function of the wireless network traffic for different values of , and we can notice a linear approximation of all the curves, showing evidence of multifractal traffic.
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log[S(q,m)]

The multifractal spectrum is a one-dimensional curve, usually with a concave profile, where the abscissa represents the Hlder exponent values [20] while the ordinate is related to the amount of signal points for a given singularity level. In this work, we adopted the Legendre spectrum because of its simplicity and robustness. However, it is worthy noticing that for some specific signal types [21], the Legendre spectrum may omit some information that could be observed through the large deviations spectrum. The mentioned simplicity of estimation of the Legendre spectrum arises from its definition. Definition 4: Let q the partition function of a signal t . The Legendre spectrum of t is given by:

(Equ. 7)

5 0 -5 -10 -15 1

q=-5 q=-4 q=-3 q=-2 q=-1 q= 0 q= 1 q= 2 q= 3 q= 4 q= 5

where is the Legendre transform of the partition function q , given by: =

(Equ. 8)

4 log(m)

Fig. 4 Sum Partition

Figure 6 are shown several multifractal spectra for the same wireless network traffic trace, collected through the channel 1, but for different scales of aggregation. We can verify that even for large time scale, the typical features of the concavity of multifractal processes are present, giving us another clue to the wireless network traffic is multifractal and that by trying to model self-similar processes can bring failure.
1.2 1 0.8 0.6
f()

The slope of the line obtained by least squares approximation is called qi and c qi equal to the intersection of the ordinate axis and the straight in question. Figure 5 we present the function q obtained from analisys the wireless network traffic of channel 1, and we may observe a concave appearance of this function, being in agreement as mentioned in Definition 2. B. Multifractal Spectrum There are several ways of obtaining the multifractal spectrum of a signal; the most popular ones include the large deviations spectrum, the Hausdorff spectrum and the Legendre spectrum [19]. Basically any one of these three spectral is capable of providing information about the level and distribution of singularities in a signal.
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Real Traffic 5msec 10msec 25msec 50msec 100msec 250msec 500msec 1000msec

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Fig. 6 Multifractal Spectra

C. Autocorrelation Function The autocorrelation function of a process can indicate the presence or not of long-range dependence (LRD) in a time

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process. Moreover, the autocorrelation function reflects the second order statistic characteristics of time series. Thus, define the autocorrelation function as follows: Definition 5: Let a discrete-time process n and the instants of time and , the autocorrelation function cor[ n n + k ] for this process is given as: [ + ] = [ + ] (Equ. 9)

Figure 7 shows the autocorrelation function for the of wireless network traffic trace collected through the channel 1 of a conference (IETF) [5]. By inspection of Figure 7 we note that the traffic analysis presents long-range dependence for different time scales, and one more point that makes us say that the wireless network traffic is multifractal.
1 0.9 0.8
Autocorrelation Function

axis and values of . If a process is monofractal, the diagram results is a straight and a constant. In the case of a multifractal process, the diagram results in a curve and is no-constant [25]. Multiscale diagrams for the wireless network traffic trace are shown in Figure 8 where we can observe non-linearity in MD and inconstancy in LMD for the trait, indicating one more time the evidence of multifractal.
Multiscale Diagram: (j1,j2) = (1, 8) 0 -0.5 -1 -0.15 -1.5 q -2 -2.5 -3 -3.5 0 2 4 6 q 8 10 12 2 4 6 q 8 10 12 -0.25 hq -0.05 Linear Multiscale Diagram: hq= q / q

-0.1

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Real Traffic 5msec 10msec 25msec 50msec 100msec 250msec 500msec 1000msec

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Fig. 8 Multiscale Diagram

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Conclusion

Fig. 7 Autocorrelation Function

D. Multiscale Diagram Another important function in multifractal analysis is the partition function based on wavelets. Instead of calculating the exponents of regularity local, statistics of local behavior of a process can be obtained by its partition function based on wavelet . To do this follows the following definition. Definition 6: Let denoting the volume of traffic (bytes total) observed at time in a temporal scale j. The partition function based on wavelet is given by [22]:
= | |

(Equ. 10)

For certain multifractal processes the partition function scales asymptotically as: 2 ~. +

In this paper, we study the behavior of wireless network traffic, collected from a large gathering of researchers. We present definitions of self-similar traffic and estimate the Hurst parameter through various methods. We can see that there is a wide variation in results and say that the wireless network traffic is self-similar based only in this value becomes insufficient. Thus to understand what the behavior of real traffic, we analyzing according with the multifractal theory. All analysis on the traffic trace collected from a real wireless network, allowed to conclude that the traffic shows strong multifractal characteristics. What leads us to say that trying to understand the traffic through the self-similarity theory of is not precise, making network design projects are flawed.

(Equ. 11)
[1]

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Thus, the slope of 2 in function j gives us an estimate for . For monofractais processes (self-similar) varies linearly with respect to , already multifractal processes in this variation is nonlinear. To verify this property we use a tool available at [23], known as Multiscale Diagram that shows whether a process has a tendency to present monofractal or multifractal behavior in an interval [1 2 ]. Conducting this test, two parameters were defined [24]: = /2 and = / . Multiscale Diagram (MD) on the vertical axis shows the exponents on the horizontal axis and values of . Linear Multiscale Diagram (LMD) on the vertical axis shows the exponents on the horizontal

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Jeferson Wilian de Godoy Stnico received the B.S. in Mathematics from Universidade Estadual Paulista Jlio de Mesquita Filho UNESP, Brazil (2006) and M. Sc. in Electrical Engineering from State University of Campinas Unicamp, Brazil (2009), is currently Ph.D. student at Electrical Engineering from State University of Campinas Unicamp. His current research interests include network traffic modeling, network design, performance analysis and communications system. Lee Luan Ling received the B.S. and M. Sc. Degrees in electrical Engineering from University of So Paulo (1980) and State University of Campinas (1984), respectively, in So Paulo, Brazil. In 1991 he received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, USA. In 1984 he became a faculty member at School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, State University of Campinas where currently he is a Full Professor. His current research interests include pattern recognition, handwriting recognition, biometrics, image processing, artificial intelligence, video monitoring and surveillances, network traffic modeling and network design and performance analysis.

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