A Case for Fractal Traac Modeling

| Developments in telecommunications technology have outpaced progress in teletraac methods and practices. As a result, the planning and dimensioning of even the latest information-age services is, by default, commonly done on the basis of classical teletraac methods developed for circuit switched voice networks. In this paper, we will discuss recent traac measurement studies which have demonstrated that measured traac streams from working packet switched networks exhibit variations and uctuations over a wide range of time scales. We motivate the application of fractal models to parsimoniously represent this apparent complexity of actual network traac, illustrate some immediate beneets that arise from moving beyond traditional traac model-ing concepts and accepting the idea of the fractal nature of network traac dynamics, and discuss the use of frac-tal models to develop traac management methods that are accurate, practical, and based on a solid understanding of the traac observed in \real-life" packet switched networks.