Evaluating self-similar processes for modeling graphical remote desktop systems´ network traffic

The increasing speed of internet access links motivated the shift in applications, used to remotely access the computers, from the text-based terminal connections to graphical remote desktop systems (GRDS). Because these services are highly interactive, user-perceived latency is more important than in other different types of internet applications (such as Web, Video streaming, and Peer-to-Peer File transfer), which usually attract the researchers´ attention. In previous studies, the traffic performance is shown to be mainly affected by the statistical nature of applications´ packet arrival process at network level. This paper describes characterization and modeling of graphical remote desktop system´s network traffic at the IP level. Following the past researches, we have evaluated self-similar processes and noticed a very good fit at timescales ranging from 100 ms to 5 s and from 10 to 200 s. We provide the reasons for this self-similar traffic behavior and discuss its consequences at the development of synthetic workloads and performance studies of GRDS systems.