Self-similar and fractal nature of internet traffic

The self-similar bursty Internet traffic is usually characterized by the Hurst parameter (H). Such a process is also seen to possess fractal characteristics in time described by a parameter (b), with multifractals in most cases. We observe that these highly stochastic traffics have fractals in flow density too, described by a fractal dimension (D), also with the possibiliy of multifractals as in the former. This requires another parameter for the description of Internet traffic, besides the usual selfsimilarity parameter b or H and the different simulations or models worked out to understand the Internet traffic to reproduce the characteristics as found in the present work. We also find a notable selfsimilarity feature of the autocorrelations in the data and its aggregates, in all the cases studied. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.