Burstiness in data traffic is emerging as a critical property that protocol analysis can no longer ignore. To preserve the kind of burstiness or scaling phenomena observed in aggregated TCP traffic, we develop a behavioral model that captures TCP's windowbased and closed-loop control. Through a novel modeling technique -exhaustive state exploration, we systematically examine each TCP states over a restricted range of connection length and packet loss. This restricted range covers the TCP

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... r most common to web exchanges. When connections step outside this range we preserve simulation accuracy by taking an abstraction fault and changing to a more detailed model. By counting packets with interarrival times falling into certain critical intervals -round trip time (RTT) or retransmission timeout (RTO), we are able to create finite state automaton (FSA) with states and transitions indicating rounds of back-to-back packet transmissions. We demonstrate that an FSA approximation of TCP can produce light-weight simulation models of TCP suitable for background traffic, and that these models accurately reproduce multifractal scaling behavior in IP network traffic.