On the role of flows and sessions in Internet traffic modeling: an explorative toy-model

In this work we present a simple toy-model that is able to explain certain empirical observations reported in a set of previous papers by Hohn et al. [1]–[3] about the wavelet spectrum of real traffic traces. Therein, the authors found that the wavelet spectrum is substantially invariant to flow scrambling and truncation. Such finding suggested that super-flow structures above the transport layer — i.e., sessions — can be ignored for modeling the packet arrival process. Based on the proposed toy model, we offer an interpretation framework that goes in the opposite direction, indicating that sessions, not transport-layer flows, should be taken as the main structural entities in simplified on/off models.