The simplest way of measuring the effect UDP data has on TCP is via simulation. Simulation provides both a way of controlling such parameters as connection bandwidth, router queue lengths and traffic levels, and ways to record such statistics as queue utilisation, packet loss and connection throughput. Attempting to obtain these sorts of results from an actual network would be both extremely costly and difficult.
Simulation however can only produce results as reliable and as accurate as the models employed.
A traffic model provides a method for a simulator to create the data to flow through the network. Without accurate models to do this, the results of simulations would have no reference to real networks, creating pointless results. This project luckily has access to a simulator of this quality. ATM-TN provides an actual TCP stack, derived from 4.4 BSD Lite, and a powerful simulation engine. A traffic model for this simulator exists for HTTP traffic which makes use of TCP for transmission.