A Performance Comparison of Monofractal and Multifractal Traffic Streams

This paper focuses on the differences between monofractal and multifractal network traffic, both in terms of modeling approaches, and in terms of practical impacts on network performance. Empirical traffic traces are used in the parameterization and evaluation of traffic models. Simulation is used to evaluate the performance differences between monofractal and multifractal traffic, both for individual traffic streams and for aggregations of traffic streams. The simulation results indicate that multifractal traffic offers greater potential for multiplexing gains, both within and across sources. The sensitivity of these results to source characteristics and switch buffer size is also explored.