On the elasticity of traffic matrices and the impact on capacity expansion

Traffic matrices are fundamental for network design, capacity expansion and traffic engineering. A Traffic matrix describes the rate or volume transferred between the ingress and egress nodes of a network. Internet traffic is dominantly TCP traffic and thus adapts to changing network conditions like routing or capacity. This effect is systematically neglected when using normal traffic matrices. This paper investigates the effect using three analytical models. It also shows how to use elastic traffic matrices for capacity expansion problems that do not neglect this effect.