Exploring regularities and self-similarity in Internet traffic

The characterization and quantitative description of Internet traffic is becoming increasingly important in light of the rapid growth being observed in the size and usage of the network. Modeling of modern teletraffic and large telecommunications networks with fractal stochastic processes has been investigated by analyzing traffic measurements collected on the “Federico II” university WAN link to the National Research Network backbone, and using them to test the existence of fractal behavior and specific properties. A fractal character with approximate selfsimilarity and statistical long-range dependence has been observed in the Internet access traffic measurements. This approach leads to some interesting insights about whether and how regularities in Internet user behavior can be noticed and exploited. The derived characterization could be seen as a first step to a generalized parametric Internet traffic model. Key-Words: Internet traffic modeling, self-similarity, long-range dependency