Abstract

At the 1993 ITC seminar in St. Petersburg, we presented results from traffic measurement studies that demonstrated the self-similar ("fractal") nature of measured packet traffic [15]. In the meantime, a flurry of new results has been published on applications of fractal (or self-similar) processes to measurements, modeling and analysis of bursty packet traffic in high-speed communications networks. The main purpose of this paper is to summarize the current state-of-the-art in this rapidly developing area of traffic modeling. To this end, we present the results from recent (i) measurement studies of actual network traffic, including work aimed at providing a physical explanation for the fractal nature of aggregate network traffic, (ii) approaches to model and analyze fractal traffic models, and (iii) work on engineering impacts. Together, these recent advances suggest that fractal models of high-speed network traffic will play an increasingly vital role not only in characterization and ...

Citations