Hybrid simulation of a FIFO queuing system with trace-driven background traffic

This paper introduces a novel hybrid packet-event / fluid-flow network simulation scheme. A packet-event simulation technique uses the arrivals and the departures of packets to model the queuing system. The applications that need finegrained performance details, are simulated with an adapted event based approach. The impact of the background traffic on these foreground packets is simulated by virtual packets, which are created and put in the queue each time a foreground packet arrives. The calculation of the number and the size of these virtual packets is based on a fluid-flow approximation of the buffer occupation probability density function of the background stream. A Many Sources Large Deviations traffic descriptor is used to characterize the fluid-flow. A numerical evaluation of this hybrid simulation scheme is performed with a video streaming application as foreground traffic and measured network traces as background traffic.