Aggregated equivalency for on-off models

In this paper, we propose a method to simulate the aggregated traffic of a number of homogeneous on-off traffic sources by a reduced equivalent set that will produce the same traffic characteristics. On-Off traffic source models are used extensively to model the source traffic in the Internet. However, when traffic from a large number of sources is to be simulated, it becomes computationally prohibitive to generate each source separately. In such a case, a reduced set of aggregated models would be needed, if it can generate the same traffic intensity and traffic characteristics. An approach based on matching the first and second order statistics of the original aggregate to reduce the number of traffic generators is presented in this paper, with some simulation results.