Method of Assessing Network Traffic Characteristics of Heterogeneous Space-Air-Ground Communication Networks

One of the features of space-air-ground integrated networks and other heterogeneous networks is that most network applications operate in real-time, and network traffic is bursty and self-similar. An urgent task while designing heterogeneous networks is to predict the behavior of network traffic to take the necessary measures to preserve the information transmitted over the network. The article is devoted to the study of self-similarity properties of typical heterogeneous network traffic models, for the assessment of the degree of self-similarity of which the Hurst exponent and the total autocorrelation coefficient were used. A network traffic model in the form of an interval process is proposed, which allows modeling the moments of packet appearance, size, transmission rate, and time parameters of packet transmission over communication channels. Numerical results of the analysis of typical network traffic models in the form of point and interval processes are presented, which show that they have self-similarity properties. A simulation model of such a network with a monochannel and random-access protocols with collision detection has been developed. According the simulation results, with the Poisson model of subscriber traffic, network traffic has the property of self-similarity.

Keywords
Heterogeneous network; Bursty traffic; Self-similarity; Hurst exponent; Interval process