The Fractal Internet: Traffic analysis, simulation, estimation and control

Long-range dependent (LRD), self-similar, chaotic behaviour has been found to be present in internet traffic by many researchers. It is especially important to understand the link between self-similarity and long-range dependence of network traffic and performance of the networks because such characterisation can be potentially applied for control purposes such as traffic shaping, load balancing, etc. Long-Range Dependence (LRD) is of great significance in traffic engineering problems such as traffic measurement, queuing behaviour and buffer sizing, admission control and congestion control. In this context, the ‘Hurst exponent’, H, is used as a measure of the degree of long-range dependence. A variety of techniques exist for estimating the Hurst exponent; these delivering a variable efficacy of estimation.