Long-Lasting Transient Conditions in Simulations with Heavy-Tailed Workloads

Recent evidence suggests that some characteristics of computer and telecommunications systems may be well described using heavy tailed distributions — distributions whose tail declines like a power law, which means that the probability of extremely large observations is non-negligible. For example, such distributions have been found to describe the lengths of bursts in network traffic and the sizes of files in some systems. As a result, system designers are increasingly interested in employing heavy-tailed distributions in simulation workloads. Unfortunately, these distributions have properties considerably different from the kinds of distributions more commonly used in simulations; these properties make simulation stability hard to achieve. In this paper we explore the difficulty of achieving stability in such simulations, using tools from the theory of stable distributions. We show that such simulations exhibit two characteristics related to stability: slow convergence to steady...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: WSC
• Authors: Mark Crovella, Lester Lipsky
• Keywords: Heavy Tailed Distributions, Heavy-tailed Distributions, Modeling And Simulation, Simulations, WSC 1997