On Merging and Splitting of Self-similar Traffic in High-speed Networks

Recent studies of high-quality, highresolution traffic have demonstrated these traffics exhibit self-similarity, which has implications for design, control and analysis of high-speed networks. Merging and splitting are basic networking operations and should be studied before we analyze the performance of the whole high speed networks. In this paper, we give the necessary and sufficient conditions for that merging of self-similar traffic streams also results in a self-similar stream, and show that splitting traffic streams of the self-similar stream are still self-similar streams by the independent splitting operation.